Coordinated chaos

There is this law. It says big-time political campaigns like those of U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor and Republican challenger Tom Cotton may not coordinate with these largely unregulated “super-PACs” and independent groups that lavishly support them.

That separation provides the basis for commentary, such as in this space, that Arkansas is being played for a sucker in this Senate battle by out-ofstate groups that care only about nationalized interests.

These groups-Harry Reid’s Senate Majority super-PAC for Pryor and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity for Cotton, and others-bombard our television screens unaccountably with deceptive and otherwise bogus advertising.

But how much “separation” is there, really? What is coordinating and what isn’t? How much should the local campaigns be blamed for the outside groups’ obscenely financed deception? Don’t these super-PACs and independent groups amount to semi-detached campaign arms, using donations of a size not inconveniently limited by law like those made directly to the actual campaigns?

Doesn’t it all make a mockery?

Let me answer the last question first: Yes.

According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Federal Election Commission has conducted the grand total of three investigations into such coordination since 1999 and, in two of those cases, imposed fines totaling $26,000.

The Senate Majority PAC and Americans for Prosperity spend $26,000 before they get out of bed in the morning.

FEC rules define coordination as occurring when a candidate or his staff becomes “materially involved” with super-PAC decisions or “shares financial responsibility.”

What’s “materially involved?” That’s hard to define, especially by an FEC beset with the tiresome stalemate of three Democratic and three Republican members.

Last week I wandered into the middle of a firefight between the Pryor and Cotton campaigns about this kind of thing.

As you may recall, I was disdainful of Reid’s super-PAC for running a certain commercial. It accuses Cotton of working for “insurance companies” and then turning around as a congressman and trying to steer poor folks’ Medicare money over to those private insurers for whom he worked.

Of all the outrages with which to hammer Cotton-his opposition to disaster aid, student loans, food stamps, the farm bill and his support for Medicare vouchers and shutting down the government and defaulting on our debt to cause global economic chaos-it astonishes me that Democrats waste their money and our time on this kind of thing.

The evidence, using the word generously, is that Cotton did a short stint as a salaried junior consultant for McKinsey and Co. Among the McKinsey clients on whose cases he worked was the Federal Housing Administration, which does insurance work.

So the Cotton campaign steered me to a Pryor campaign “microsite” online, meaning a website within the campaign’s main website. It had been active for about two months, and it contained the same charge-that Cotton worked for “insurance companies” and would reward them.

A Cotton campaign spokesman said the Pryor campaign uses “microsites” like that to send messages to the Democratic super-PACs about what it would like them to say.

Wouldn’t that be coordination? Wouldn’t that be “material involvement?” Wouldn’t that be punishable by a few thousand dollars as levied in fines by the 3-to-3 FEC?

Irked by the accusation, a Pryor spokesman shot back that “Jerry,” the truck driver in the Koch brothers’ ad benefiting Cotton, had his story told on the Cotton campaign website long before the television commercial.

Was that coordination? Material involvement?

I suspect the FEC would bog down 3-to-3 either way, don’t you?

I see three points.

  1. Our campaign-finance laws and processes are a charade. These charades were made even worse last week by the five Republican-nominated U.S. Supreme Court justices who outlawed limitations on the aggregate sums that persons may contribute to political campaigns.

  2. We should remove from our heads this notion that, while the out-of-state groups are behaving badly and insulting us, the local campaigns are not to blame. Unless the Pryor campaign wants to denounce the Harry Reid PAC’s ad, and unless the Cotton campaign wants to denounce the Koch brothers’ ad, then we may safely assume that the campaigns-while certainly not coordinating, of course, wink-wink-approve.

  3. This low caliber of campaigning bestows upon us campaign winners who can’t govern because of the egregious tactics they use to win.

The Supreme Court is not going to help, at least as long as its majority is Republican-nominated and given to anything-goes liberality in campaign finance.

The FEC is paralyzed.

The candidates are too fearful of offending their base to disown their own party’s tactics, especially if the tactics assail the other guy.

The TV stations like the revenue.

That leaves it to voters to stop being played for chumps, to tune out the racket, to examine themselves and the candidates and the issues; to pay no attention to the Kochs and Reid and Jerry, but full attention to Mark and Tom, to what those job applicants actually have done in office and what they actually say they’ll do if kept in office.

It’s rich terrain.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 83 on 04/06/2014

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