David Donnelly: Candidates will do most anything for money

When Sen. John McCain arrives in Minneapolis for a high-dollar fundraiser today, he will have already attended at least seven other fundraising events in five cities this week. This circuit is par for the course for our presidential candidates, who both are racing around the country as if on a giant Monopoly board, scooping up checks from whomever will write them.

And that's recently landed McCain in a bit of hot water.

McCain's campaign was forced to postpone another event this week -- scheduled in Midland, Texas -- when women's organizations questioned why he would hold a fundraiser at the home of oilman Clayton Williams. During his 1990 campaign for governor against the late Ann Richards, Williams equated rape to bad weather. "If it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it," he said. He also promised to treat Richards as if she were a cow, saying he'd "head her and hoof her and drag her through the dirt."

The McCain campaign feigned ignorance about Williams' past, but that claim rang hollow. These unconscionable comments are widely known in Texan and national political circles, and could have been easily found with a quick Google search. The most charitable read is that the campaign used the old Sergeant Schultz defense -- "I see nothing!" -- so that they could deny ever knowing the truth if someone caught them red-handed.

How can the campaign be so oblivious? Perhaps the insatiable drive for cash is also to blame. McCain has been asked to rid the campaign of the $300,000 that Williams raised, but so far he's refused. Returning the money or donating it to a charity is the right thing to do in this case. But this political penance would only wallpaper over the real problem: Regardless of political party, candidates are required to raise ever-increasing large sums of money to run for higher office.

Much has been written about McCain's opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, and the fundraising machine he's built. The explosion of small donations to his campaign is a hopeful sign of political engagement of millions of Americans, but it does not, in and of itself, represent an overhaul of the rules for everyone else. While small online donors fuel Obama's rise, McCain's run has been increasingly dependent on large contributions to his campaign and even larger ones to the Republican National Committee. In fact, they've set a goal of raising $120 million for the party alone. And that's how most candidates do it.

McCain will try to make political hay if Obama chooses not to participate in the presidential public financing system in the general election. But we shouldn't forget that McCain himself has already opted in, and then opted out, of the presidential system this election cycle. The only reason he's gone unchecked is the lack of a quorum at the dormant Federal Election Commission.

Relatively little has been written about what the candidates intend to do about the cash-and-carry system of paying for campaigns. On the surface, one would think that the race features two reform candidates. The truth, however, is more complex. Like his shift to support President George W. Bush's policies on tax cuts and off-shore oil drilling, McCain's record on campaign finance reform is decidedly not prologue to what he would support as president.

McCain once authored a fix to the broken presidential public financing system but now refuses to add his name as cosponsor to the same bipartisan legislation. He once called his state's Clean Elections public financing law a "national model" but now states he opposes its extension to all federal races.

Obama has cosponsored both and has said that their passage would be a priority if elected.

McCain's campaign website rightly identifies one aspect of the problem of money in politics, stating that "the most influential lobbyists with the greatest access in the nation's Capitol are also the most prolific political fundraisers," but, according to Public Citizen, McCain has five times the number of lobbyists as Obama -- 70 to 14 -- raising money for his campaign.

Under comprehensive public financing systems, like those operating successfully in a number of states around the country, candidates would rely little if at all on lobbyists and fundraisers like Clayton Williams. Perhaps that's the ultimate lesson for McCain from the canceled fundraiser in Texas. Don't just vet the fundraisers. Overhaul the system.

David Donnelly is director of Campaign Money Watch, which describes itself as a nonpartisan campaign-finance watchdog group based in Washington.