Obama Super PAC Donors Among White House Guests

Πηγή: Huffington Post
By JACK GILLUM (AP)
March 26 2012

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is using privileged access to one of America's greatest landmarks to reward his most generous financial supporters in ways that Republicans Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum can't match: More than 60 of Obama's biggest campaign donors have visited the White House more than once for meetings with top advisers, holiday parties or state dinners, a review by The Associated Press has found.

The invitations to visit 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which are a legal and established practice from incumbent presidents, came despite Obama's past criticisms of Washington's pay-for-access privileges and mark a reversal from early in the president's term when donors complained that Obama was keeping them at arm's length.

Once, when Obama was a candidate running against Hillary Rodham Clinton, his presidential campaign sharply noted that Clinton and her husband, President Bill Clinton, had invited David Geffen – whom Obama's campaign said had raised $18 million for the Clintons – to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. The AP found no evidence of Obama's own donors sleeping overnight in the White House, but timestamps showing arrivals and departures on the government's logs are incomplete for more than 1.7 million records.

The AP's review compared more than 470 of Obama's most important financial supporters against logs of 2 million visitors to the White House since mid-2009. It found that at least 250 of Obama's major fundraisers and donors visited the White House at least once, being cleared for events like dinners or one-on-one meetings with senior advisers.

Earlier this month, the White House extended invitations to more than 30 of the president's top fundraisers to an elaborate state dinner, where they mingled with celebrities and dined with foreign leaders on the South Lawn of the White House.

Other purposes for visits included one-on-one meetings with top West Wing staffers, such as former chief of staff Pete Rouse and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. Those donors include so-called "bundlers" – supporters who have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece for Obama's re-election.

Obama's campaign has said it would begin encouraging supporters to donate to the "super" political action committee supporting Obama, Priorities USA Action, to counterbalance the cash flowing to GOP groups. The decision drew rebukes from campaign-finance watchdogs and Republicans who said Obama flip-flopped on his prior stance assailing super PAC money. The group supporting Obama has raised $6.3 million so far.

Visitor-log details of some of Obama's donors have surfaced in news reports since he took office. But the financial weight of super PACs and their influence on this year's election have prompted renewed scrutiny of the big-money financiers behind presidential candidates – and what those supporters might want in return.

Many of the White House visits by donors came before the president embraced the big-money, fundraising groups he once assailed as a "threat to democracy" on the grounds they corrode elections by permitting unlimited and effectively anonymous donations from billionaires and corporations. Obama was once so vocal about super PACs that, during his 2010 State of the Union speech, he accused the Supreme Court in its 2010 Citizens United decision of reversing a century of law that would "open the floodgates for special interests." But the success of Republicans raising money changed the stakes.


Top donors to the super PAC supporting Obama, like Chicago investment manager John W. Rogers Jr. and Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, gave more than $150,000 combined to Priorities USA Action, according to finance reports, while also making repeated trips to the White House.

Rogers is a longtime Obama friend who contributed $50,000 in January – nearly all the money the super PAC collected the entire month. Rogers was selected by the administration in October 2010 to head a financial advisory council, and visited the White House more than two dozen times since Obama took office, including one-on-one meetings with former chief of staff Bill Daley and Jarrett, Obama's senior adviser. Two weeks before Rogers' contribution in January, Obama's campaign paid his firm, Ariel Investments, $600 for "event site rental," according to finance reports. An Obama campaign spokeswoman said the event was for a campaign retreat; a spokeswoman for Rogers did not follow up to repeated phone calls and emails from the AP seeking comment.

Other donors who visited the White House, either before they gave money to support Obama or afterward, include:

_Lenny Mendonca, a director of consulting firm McKinsey & Co., gave $50,000 to Priorities USA Action in November 2011, according to records submitted to the Federal Election Commission. Visitor logs showed Mendonca met in June 2011 with Carl Shapiro, one of Obama's top economic advisors, and three months earlier with Melody Barnes, the president's chief domestic policy advisor.

_Orin Kramer, a key Obama fundraiser who gave $15,000 to Priorities USA in October, attended White House events with Obama at least five times, according to visitor logs, plus his invitation to a state dinner March 14 honoring British Prime Minister David Cameron. His other visits included a smaller gathering in March 2011 that was described as a presidential meeting but records offered few details.

_Spielberg, another Obama supporter, donated $100,000 last July to Priorities USA – one of the group's largest individual contributions. One month later, Spielberg attended a Rose Garden event with the president. He also has visited the White House at least three other times, including in March 2010 to screen a movie for the president and first lady Michelle Obama.

Through a spokeswoman, Mendonca declined to comment. Kramer told the AP the information obtained from the Obama administration was "completely inaccurate," but did not deny he has visited the White House. "I help candidates because I think election outcomes matter," Kramer said in an email.

The AP's review excluded visits like White House tours available to the general public.

A White House spokesman did not fully respond to repeated requests from the AP for details of visits by Obama's campaign donors, saying it was impractical to do so.

Obama so far has raised more than $120 million for his reelection effort – not counting millions more from the Democratic Party – an outsized figure compared with potential GOP rivals like Mitt Romney, who collected $74 million in checks through the end of February. That calculus may change as wealthy billionaires who have supported their favorite candidates this primary season may rally around the eventual Republican nominee.

The Influence Industry: Activist groups want to undo ruling that led to ‘super PAC’ frenzy

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Dan Eggen

Jan 19 2012

Two years ago this week, the Supreme Court set the political world on its head by ruling that corporations could spend unlimited money on elections, rolling back decades of legal restrictions.

An array of liberal-leaning activist groups are marking the anniversary by launching new efforts to overturn the decision, including calls for a potential constitutional amendment.

The 5 to 4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission effectively laid the groundwork for super PACs, the new independent groups that have overwhelmed the Republican presidential race with millions of dollars in negative advertising over the past few weeks.

The decision, issued Jan. 21, 2010, outraged Democrats and many watchdog groups, but they’ve had little success in doing anything about it over the past two years. Activists are hoping to try again by focusing on the difficult task of passing a constitutional amendment, which would require ratification by three-quarters of the states.

“We’re already at a point where the public overwhelmingly opposes the decision,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a watchdog group helping to spearhead the efforts. “The goal is to build a grass-roots movement that will eventually be able to shape the debate.”

Public Citizen is teaming up with local activists to stage about 300 rallies and other events, most of them on Friday or Saturday, targeting multinational companies around the country. Many are being billed as “Occupying the Corporations” protests, inspired by the anti-Wall Street demonstrations that have taken hold in recent months.

Common Cause also launched its own pro-amendment project this week, dubbed Amend2012 and chaired by Clinton administration labor secretary Robert Reich. It includes a petition drive opposing the Supreme Court’s judgment that corporations have the same rights as people when it comes to political speech.

“It’s time to stop the unlimited flow of corrupting money into our elections,” the group’s petition reads. “To do that, we need a constitutional amendment to reverseCitizens United and declare that only people are people.”

On another front, the Corporate Reform Coalition, a group of institutional investors and others, is backing a petition drive urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to require corporations to disclose political spending to shareholders.

These and other such efforts essentially serve as an acknowledgment that previous attempts at reform after the Citizens United decision failed miserably. In 2010, the White House and Democrats in Congress tried to pass legislation requiring fuller disclosure of political spending by corporations, but the changes were blocked by Senate Republicans.

Advocates for stricter campaign finance laws are also disgruntled by the Federal Election Commission, which frequently deadlocks along party lines and has given super PACs wide latitude. Several watchdog groups are conducting a petition drive urging President Obama to fill vacant FEC seats. The seats remain occupied by previous commissioners for a lack of nominees.

“While the courts did plenty to create this mess . . . the FEC bears much responsibility for making a bad situation disastrous,” Meredith McGehee, policy director at Campaign Legal Center, said in a recent statement. “With super PACs running amok, the Republican presidential primary is exhibit A of a system out of control, and the FEC is complicit in this auctioning of the White House.”

Conservatives in large part take a much different tack, viewing Citizens United as just one step toward a less-regulated election system. Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, while complaining about some of the ads put out by super PACs, has argued in recent days that contribution and spending limits should be removed for candidates as well.

“I would like to get rid of the campaign finance laws that were put in place,” Romney said at a debate Monday night in Myrtle Beach, S.C. “ . . . Let people make contributions they want to make to campaigns, let campaigns then take responsibility for their own words and not have this strange situation we have.”

Amendments to the Constitution must first be proposed by a two-thirds supermajority vote of both the House and the Senate. (Two-thirds of state legislatures can also call for a national convention, but the approach has never been used.) Then 38 states would have to ratify the amendment, through either their legislatures or state-level conventions.

Amendments are notoriously difficult to launch, and even more difficult to get ratified. The 27th Amendment, which limits increases in congressional pay, was first proposed in 1789 — and not ratified until 203 years later, in 1992.

Weissman and others say they are under no illusions about how difficult such an effort would be.

“I think everyone understands that winning a constitutional amendment is an uphill fight and a long-term struggle,” he said.

Ediror's Note: For background see: US Elections Special: How Limits on Campaign Financing Are Being Demolished for 2012