Soccer Dad

Covering themselves, but not in glory

Yesterday's Washington Post reported on the failure of the Obama campaign to verify electronic donations. The first part of the article - featured on A2 not above the fold on A1 - is rather underwhelming. It reports the problem and the campaign's response without any skepticism. However late in the article we learn something important:

The Obama team's disclosures came in response to questions from The Washington Post about the case of Mary T. Biskup, a retired insurance manager from Manchester, Mo., who turned up on Obama's FEC reports as having donated $174,800 to the campaign. Contributors are limited to giving $2,300 for the general election.

Biskup, who had scores of Obama contributions attributed to her, said in an interview that she never donated to the candidate. "That's an error," she said. Moreover, she added, her credit card was never billed for the donations, meaning someone appropriated her name and made the contributions with another card.

No amount of protestations by the Obama campaign that they investigate all donations at the "back end" can be taken seriously with the Biskup story, given that her doppelganger contributed over 70 times the legal limit.

What's interesting is the NY Times Opinionator seems offended that the NY Times article on the topic of phony donors doesn't get much play. The Opinionator makes this incredible observation:

Between the prepaid cards and The Times's earlier disclosure of people donating to the Democratic candidate under fictitious names, conservatives are talking up campaign finance reform.

Campaign reform? Are you kidding? Conservatives are talking about complying with existing laws. The Times article on the topic from three weeks ago seems mostly focused on demonstrating that the problem isn't that bad.

Although campaigns have long wrestled with questionable donations, Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, said the record-setting number of new donors Mr. Obama has drawn, many of them online, presents new challenges to a compliance system that remains stuck in the past.

Ms. Krumholz pointed out, however, that it would take an extraordinary amount of coordination to pull off widespread fraud.

Of course the case of Ms. Biskup shows an "extraordinary amount of coordination."

Plus as Hot Air observes, this was clearly not accidental. Yet editors at papers like the Washington Post and New York Times are oddly incurious about the implication of the front runner openly flouting election law. I haven't seen an editorial at either paper denouncing the insidious influence of undocumented money.

It looks like the papers are now trying to cover themselves. They're not the only ones, Campbell Brown of CNN just noticed that Sen. Obama broke his public financing pledge. (via memeorandum)

Eric Trager shows just how valuable Sen. Obama's fundraising advantage was:

Most damaging, however, the $3 million that the campaign spent airing this half-hour of pure Hollywood is already reminding the media of candidate Obama's most hypocritical act to date: his decision to opt out of public financing despite his previous pledge to accept it. Simple math beautifully illustrates Obama's duplicitously achieved advantage: $3 million would be a significant 3.5% of the McCain campaign's legally limited budget, but is less than 0.5% of Obama's unlimited war chest.

Well no, it isn't unlimited but it is quite a bit larger.

The lack of media scrutiny into these aspects of Sen. Obama's campaign show an incredible malfeasance on their part. Especially because usually they're the ones decrying the undue influence and vast amounts of money required to run a campaign nowadays. But, hey, what are principles, when your guy is winning?

Like I wrote before, the media are covering themselves by belatedly reporting on these aspects of the campaign, but they're not covering themselves in glory.