The Slush Funds of Iowa

[spanone]

compliments of the george w. bu$h* supreme court.

wait till the general election...!

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Turning on the television in Iowa recently has meant getting hit by an unrelenting arctic blast of campaign ads stunning in volume and ferocity. Residents here say they have never seen anything like the constant negativity in decades of witnessing the quadrennial combat of the state presidential caucuses. The ads have transformed the Republican race for a simple reason: a new landscape of unlimited contributions to “independent” groups that was created by the Supreme Court.

To influence the small fraction of Iowa voters who will participate in Tuesday’s caucuses, the candidates and their supporters will have spent $12.5 million, an unprecedented amount. Only a third of that was spent by the candidates themselves; the rest comes from the “super PACs” that most of the candidates have allowed to be established. These political action committees are essentially septic tanks into which wealthy individuals and corporations can drop unlimited amounts of money, which is then processed into ads that are theoretically made independently of the candidates.

But the PACs are, in fact, a vital part of the campaigns’ strategy. They are run by intimates of each candidate, and whether they actually communicate in detail about the timing and content of particular ads is beside the point. In many cases, the PACs (most of which have not disclosed their donors) have clearly been assigned the dirty work of tearing down a candidate’s opponent, while the candidate gets to hide behind sunny, stirring ads ending with a statement of approval of the message.

The best example is Mitt Romney, whose campaign has spent more than $1 million on upbeat ads about his work in the private sector, his long marriage and his devotion to his church. One even featured his wife, Ann, talking about the importance of character in a candidate. Meanwhile, his PAC, Restore Our Future, has spent $2.85 million largely to attack other candidates, in particular Newt Gingrich. As Nicholas Confessore and Jim Rutenberg put it in The Times on Saturday, Mr. Romney “has effectively outsourced his negative advertising to a group that has raised millions of dollars from his donors to inundate his opponents with attacks.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/opinion/the-slush-funds-of-iowa.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

[JNelson6563]

1. Nothing puts the lie to the stupidity of "they're the same!1!"

like the SCOTUS.

Cause we all know Obama's choices of SCOTUS justices have been indistinguishable from W's, right? This money orgy in politics ought to help drive that point home.

Good post.

Julie

[MakingSense]

2. We only have ourselves to blame for this

Like it or not, from the perspective of constitutional literalists the court's job is decide what is legal not what is right. It's about legality not justice. For much of last centry we have often relied on the court to do what the legislature would not and we had to side step the black and white legal interpretations to do it. How is it our fault you ask? We the people never ensrined the changes we wanted into the Constitution. That was very short sighted on our part. Now that we have a court more willing to consider text over precident we are not happy with the outcome of their decisions. This is why I have always been confused over the outrage about the SC's decision. Based on the details of the case and the letter of law it was the correct decision even if we don't like the outcome.


If we want to fix this then we have to do it through legislation so that what is legal and what is right are in line.