Election finances

Have we caught on to how important it is to know who is giving money to which candidates?

Iowa put a lot of votes into Huckabee and Edwards, neither of whom is working with huge warchests.

In 2004, normally Republican oil interests contributed to John Kerry's campaign just when it looked like he would drop out of the race. It is not a coincidence that the Republicans were ready to "swiftboat" Kerry and make him into a flip-flopper. They could not do either to Howard Dean or to Dick Gephardt. Kerry would have been a good President but the Republicans knew they could beat him. Like Gore, he did not have the charisma to carry him past the election frauds of Ohio and Florida.

So who would the Republicans like to have run as the Dem candidate? I think they have already let us know by who has the huge campaign warchests.

If you haven't figured it out already (or if you haven't heard this story before), let me describe a conversation between an advocate for single parents and Hillary Clinton. As the wife of the then sitting President, Mrs. Clinton had been very supportive of issues related to single parents such as the high interest rates and penalties on credit cards. When she ran for the Senate, she suddenly stopped being supportive and went silent. The advocate encountered her and asked her why she would not speak out against the financial community that supported the high rates. "They are my constituents too," Mrs. Clinton said.

Senator Obama receives money from the health insurance industry. His health insurance program keeps their position in place and largely expands it. I'm not sure that makes it a better program than what has been proposed by Edwards and other Democrats. If he sees his donors as his constituents, well, the bigger the donor, the bigger constituency!

It will be very interesting to see if New Hampshire voters picked up on that exchange in the debate the other night.

And will South Carolina have noticed what the Iowa and the New Hampshire vetters see from their eye-ball to eye-ball meetings with the candidates? Or will we all end up being snowed by the mass media blitzes of the moneyed candidates when the rest of the primaries roll around?

I hope that Dem candidates maintain rapport so that after the primaries they will unite and form a solid leadership team which then goes on into office next November.

But the exchange between Edwards and Clinton over the old established politics and the new should haunt all the candidates, especially the ones who finally win their respective nominations.

And let's hope the news media realizes that it is news and spreads the word when a major donor contributes to a candidate.