One common complaint about the internet is that it’s too easy to inadvertently stumble onto offensive material when innocently searching for something else. I had such an experience today. I was searching for some information, and ended up on a page with a teaser link that I couldn’t resist following. I won’t claim to be shocked by what I found, but I certainly was disgusted.
My surfing journey began with an innocent trip to the Federal Election Commission. I was curious to see how my favorite presidential candidate, Dennis Kucinich, was doing in the fund-raising game. The answer is not good. He’s raised about $3.4 million so far. That compares to about $4.5 million for Bob Graham, who just dropped out because he wasn’t raising enough money; $25 million for Democratic front-runner Dean; and $85 million for Bush.
It wasn’t even the $85 million for Bush that disgusted me, although that is pretty disgusting. It was that link on the Campaign Finance Reports and Data page, just sitting there beckoning to me: Individual Search. With a few keystrokes and a click, I could get details on any individual’s contributions. They had me; I couldn’t resist.
I could claim it was just my computer geek curiosity, wanting to check out the system’s function. But I needed a name that would produce some results. It didn’t take long to think of one. I have cousins in the highway contracting business, and it’s well known that financial success in the road-building business depends on favors bestowed by grateful politicians. When campaign finance reports are published in the newspapers, it’s not unusual to see that certain individuals have made substantial contributions to both sides, just to cover all their bets. And this page was promising to show me the whole sordid history.
So I typed in a name, and the system delivered as promised. Six years of contributions from one cousin, to the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and various individual candidates from both parties, totalling over $65,000. And that’s just contributions subject to federal reporting, which includes federal races (Congressional and Presidential), and soft money to state parties. It doesn’t include donations to individual candidates in state elections. It also doesn’t include contributions made by his wife, whose occupation is listed as “housewife”, and whose contributions totalled another $34,000 over the same period. It’s good to see that housewifing pays well enough to enable her to make such generous contributions to the candidates of her choice. And it’s good to see that she shares her husband’s sense of fair play, distributing the wealth across the entire political spectrum. I suppose it would raise rumors of domestic strife if one spouse contributed exclusively to one party, while the other spouse contributed to the other party.
As I said, I’m not really shocked or surprised that this is the cost of doing business if business depends on government contracts. But it is pretty obscene.