Big Money

Cash makes a splash in the news this week. Campaign finance is the story.

It's been a few week since Barack Obama locked the nomination and that Hillary Clinton begrudgingly "suspended her campaign". This expression is used when a candidate is no longer fighting for the election but is still making public appearances and raising money on her own behalf. Remember she owes $10M to vendors and $12M to herself ! 

A joint fund raising campaign is now underway with Obama trying to encourage the 1.6Mdonors who contributed small sums to his campaign to help Sen. Clinton and with the Clinton campaign sharing their big "bundlers" ( people who raise bundles of small donations on the behalf of a candidate) with the Obama camp. 

This effort seems to yield two net results : first it improves the Democrats ability to fund their campaign but more importantly by campaigning side by side the candidates are certainely sending a reassuring message of unity to their base. 

To send the message out, they held a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, one of the battlegrounds of November : check out the coordinated outfits of the two former rivals!

Previously another money related piece of news hit the headline : Obama declined the public funding for his campaign, thus signalling that he trusts that he can raise more money than the limited amount ($84M) he would be granted by the State to run his presidential bid. 

This is the first time that a candidate has chosen this option ever since campaign finance regulation was introduced in the wake of the Watergate scandal. And during the primary, the Democratic candidate had said he would accept this limited funding and try to find an agreement with his Republican opponent to cap campaign spending. He thus appears to have opportunistically changed his mind after discovering the power of his fund raising machine. 

McCain will be using public funding and thus spending a large yet mimited amount of money trying to get elected. Republicans obviously attack Obama for his decision and say that their candidate will be placed at a financial disadvantage. The Democrats' response is that : in fact the Republicans will spend far more than $84M dollars to get their candidate elected, via advertisements financed by "shadow groups" commonly called "527s". These groups often run extremely aggressive ads : the most infamous example being the swiftboat smear campaign against Sen. Kerry that seriously damaged the Democratic candidate's credibility. Watch the video. McCain himself lost the 2000 primary to George Bush in part due to a rumour about his daughter, fueled by such 527 organizations. Their allegations seriously impaired his chances in South Carolina and might have cost him the nomination. 

For an analysis of this issue of campaign finance, refer to the NYTimes.

Other issues at random : 

Obama seems to be courting the evangelical vote and competing with the Republicans for what has been one of their strongest voting blocks since 1980 and Ronald Reagan's first election. This emphasizes the evolution currently underway within the evangelical community, perhaps heralding a break-down of what has long been called the religious right. 

The National Review is suggesting that Barack Obama himself is injecting race into the campaign in the hope of hurting McCain by a preemptive strike. 

The blog www.politico.com write about the GOP's strategy to paint Obama as a conventional politician, eager to serve his own ambitions; thus seeking to undermine his message of hope and renewal. Simultaneously the Republican strategists are re-introducing McCain as a patriot, a war hero who is able of making the tough decisions: when a prisonner in Vietnam he was offered the chance to go home, but he "put his country first" (= refused to offer a great propaganda opportunity to the ennely). McCain also highlights his achievements as a bi-partisan legislator, capable of bringing people together to pass important pieces of legislation. This will help the Senator from Arizona dissociate himself from the Bush administration which, it is suggested, placed self interest and political motivations ahead of the common good.