One of the biggest political stories of 2010 is the role of mega-bucks undisclosed campaign contributions pouring into races to help defeat candidates that otherwise might have had a better fighting chance. In most cases those candidates were Democrats. But now Walter Shapiro writes in Politics Dailyy that GOPers might be pleased now in how this new political world operated but could find that there will be complications in 2012.
According to Shapiro, the political landscape is now ripe for undisclosed big bucks contributions to potentially have all kinds of impacts — including on the 2012 Republican Presidential primaries:
Here is a wrinkle that might arouse Republicans out of their what-me-worry complacency about the new mostly unregulated free market in political spending. Without disclosure laws, the next major battleground for anonymous political attack ads will be the 2012 GOP presidential primaries. It is easy to concoct scenarios under which a leading Republican presidential contender loses the nomination because of a $30 million burst of negative commercials secretly paid for by — who knows? — the Democrats or a diabolical corporation or an eccentric billionaire who wants the “Beer Barrel Polka” to replace “Hail to the Chief.”
This notion might seem outlandish because historically the financing of presidential primary campaigns has been remarkably aboveboard compared to the muck of the rest of contemporary politics. (Just to be clear – the attacks on John Kerry in 2004 by the Swift Boat Veterans were launched only after he became the de facto Democratic nominee). Aside from a few partial self-funders like Mitt Romney ($45 million of his own money in 2008), candidates in past primaries have raised money the old-fashioned way: one individual donor at a time with all contributions above $200 made public by the Federal Election Commission. The few aberrations from this pattern stand out in memory — particularly, avid George W. Bush supporters Charles and Sam Wyly who created a front organization called Republicans for Clean Air to run $2 million in negative spots against John McCain before major 2000 GOP primaries.
Sadly, the wily Wyly brothers were visionaries ahead of their time. During the coming race for the 2012 GOP nomination, the candidates’ own commercials may be drowned out by a cacophony of 30 second smack-down ads paid for by mysterious groups with impossible-to-decipher names like the Glorious Beyond Belief American Future Fund and Citizens for Everyone To Be As Rich As We Are. The hidden funding might come (hypothetically) from business groups that tangled with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour when he was a Washington lobbyist, or Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels when he was George W. Bush’s budget director. Anyone prominent enough to run for president has made important enemies somewhere along the way — and the porous campaign laws provide ample opportunity for monied interests to get even without leaving fingerprints.
It may seem ridiculously premature to worry about the fairness of the 2012 Republican primaries when the votes are still being counted in the 2010 Alaska Senate race. But the history of presidential nomination fights underscores that almost no one worries about the integrity of the process until it is too late — and then suddenly the entire political world is belatedly obsessed with Democratic super-delegates or why the 2008 Michigan and Florida primaries did not really count.
And, indeed, you can already see some possible areas where this money could come into play. Several news stories now have indicated that GOP establishment bigwigs want to find a way to short-circuit Sarah Palin. Will some of this money that was so helpful to Tea Party and Palin backed candidates in 2012 be put to use against her since he is perceived by Republican estabslishment figures as someone who would be a disaster in a general election? Or will there be big bucks in undisclosed campaign contributions trying to defeat those GOP etablishment candidates that Palin & Co are trying to get off the political stage?
Oftentimes when things happen and there is a predicted consequence there are also subsidiary consequences. In this instance, 2010 may have been the debut on the political stage of something that will be seen in different acts, with different actors in… different roles..
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.