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Q&A

A conversation with Charles Lewis
about campaign finance

FOLLOW THE MONEY

by Ed Wojcicki

Charles Lewis, author of The Buying of the President (Avon Books, 1996), has received a grant from the Joyce Foundation to work with Illinois media on the subject of campaign finance.

Lewis is the executive director of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that concentrates on ethics and public service issues. Among the center's board members are Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania; Texas author and columnist Molly Ivins; and William Julius Wilson, an author on race and poverty who recently moved from the University of Chicago to Harvard University.

Between 1977 and 1988, Lewis was an investigative reporter. He worked for ABC News and CBS News, most recently as a producer for 60 Minutes. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation and other publications.

In the past two years, Lewis and other center staff have been working in Indiana with a consortium of media — led by the Indianapolis Star — to publicize the role of money in Indiana politics.

The Star published numerous artcles earlier this year in a series entitled "Statehouse sellout: How special interests hijacked the legislature." These articles and the public response to them provided the catalyst for campaign finance reform in Indiana this year, including a prohibition on contributions from gambling interests and a requirement that the state computerize campaign finance records.

The Buying of the President details Lewis' analysis of the financial interests behind this year's candidates for the White House.

The following is an edited interview.

Q. Is the presidency of the United States for sale?

A. I think it has become a giant auction because you have a group of politicians who are either millionaires, or are willing and able to raise millions from very narrow, vested economic interests. On the other hand, you have those interests that are more than happy to give large sums of money into the process.

And so if you do not raise millions of dollars, you will not be elected president. It's real simple.

In 1995, $110 million was raised by the presidential candidates from private funds before a single vote was cast in Iowa or New Hampshire or anywhere. Three presidential candidates — Bill Clinton, Bob Dole and Phil Gramm — raised over $20 million each. Clinton raised more than $26 million in just seven months, which is $123,000 a day.

When you raise that kind of money, you're not talking bake sales or backyard barbecues. You're talking major folks who have serious agendas and want something from the federal government.

Q. What do they want?

A. There could be a subsidy issue. There could be a tax issue. There could be regulations that some agency is dealing with. They may want to go on a trade mission with a cabinet secretary. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of things that could be of a dollar value to their company or to them personally or to their labor union.

Q. How did we get to this point from the point where it was considered a nice thing to send a contribution to your favorite candidate?

A. In 1968, 8 percent of the American people gave money to candidates for Congress and the presidency. In 1992 the percent was down to 4 per-

22 / November 1996 Illinois Issues

cent. Now that's not a lot of people, first of all. We're talking about an exclusive game.

What we're talking about here is that checks in the amount of $200 or higher come from one-third of 1 percent of the American people. So the people that give money — the corporations, the CEOs, the executives, wealthy individuals in general, labor unions, law folks — have incredibly deep pockets, and they are the ones who are subsidizing, sponsoring, propping up our political process.

Q. How did it get this way?

A. First of all, campaigns and elections have gotten vastly more expensive over the years. There's an entire industry that puts on campaigns now. Not just the TV folks and the TV ads, which are high, but you have the pollsters and the strategists and the focus group gurus.

As campaigns have gotten more expensive, the ways of raising money have gotten more sophisticated.

Also, in the wake of the post-Watergate reforms that were enacted, with the $1,000 limits on contributions and other things, everyone has found ways around the limits.

Politicians and patrons wink and nod and understand that when you look in the records and you find 60 contributions the same day from people in the same small town, and some of them are 6-year-old children who can't even read and they've given a thousand bucks, and it's legal, you know you've got a problem.

Charles Lewis author of The Buying of the President

Q. It's ironic, isn't it, that the Water- gate reforms have produced this system? A. Well, they have. In a way, the system always existed. If you go back to the 1700s, money and power have always found a way to be together, and money has always influenced policy, and moneyed interests have always had a louder voice in our democracy. That is just a fact of life. [After Watergate], when we found that the average contribution during Watergate was $40,000, and $52 million was raised from a little over a thousand individuals and 20-some-thing blue-chip companies were all convicted of illegal contributions, the American people held their collective nose and passed some reforms as a way of minimizing those gargantuan sums of money, to make it fairer for folks who don't have money. The idea of the limits was perfectly logical, and everyone from Gerald Ford — who said, "The times demand this legislation" — felt it was a good thing. The problem here is the wealthy moneyed interests, which have always been a big part of our process, have found a way around these rules. So 60 people give a thousand dollars each; "soft money" — large unlimited contributions to the parties — proliferates, and suddenly, you have tens of millions being given to both parties this election year. Q. Give me a good definition of soft money. A. Companies and labor unions have limits of $5,000 [per election] in terms of what they can give as political action committees [for federal campaigns], and that's onerous to them. So they found another way to move that money, and they move it in through the party [rather than directly to candidates]. The reason it's called soft money is because if you ever try to figure out how the party spent the money, and for whom, and in what states, good luck. It's soft and squishy; you'll never figure it out.

Decatur-based Archer Daniels Midland Co. and its head Dwayne Andreas are among the largest contributors to both parties in national political campaigns, using their corporate PAC, individual donations, the ADM Foundation and the Andreas Foundation. "In the three-year period between 1991 and 1994," Lewis writes, 'ADM and the Andreas family contributed more than $1 million to the Republican and Democratic national committees, with Republicans netting more than $900,000 of the stash. In 1994, ADM alone gave approximately $2.5 million to various congressional candidates."

Q. In your hook you mention ADM rather prominently. Do you think Dwayne Andreas is a good corporate

Illinois Issues November 1996 / 23

citizen by being so involved in politics, by the way that he and his family give money?

A. I understand some people think it's perfectly reasonable and a democratic right and a free-speech issue to individually, and even as a company, contribute to the process, and of course ADM contributes lavishly to both parties.

That's a philosophical argument someone could make. I don't particularly share it.

Let's look at what ADM did with Dole. They gave him over $200,000 in contributions in his political career — well over $200,000, but at least that much. We know they took him on 35 trips on their corporate jet throughout the nation. We know that Dwayne Andreas sold a condominium to the Doles back in 1982 in Bal Harbour, Fla., reportedly below the market price. The first payment on the condo was half a year after the purchase date.

Most Americans don't have a condo in Florida, and most Americans don't get to make the first payment on a property six months after they buy it.

I guess what I'm saying is the degree of influence and coziness and incestuousness between Andreas and the most powerful member of the U.S. Senate for the past 15 years, Bob Dole, is legendary.

And oh, by the way, ADM has gotten millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies in ethanol and many other agribusiness products, and no one has helped them get those subsidies more in the U.S. Congress in the last two decades than Bob Dole.

Q. Why does it matter?

A. It affects prices; it affects what we pay; it affects the cost of food; it affects the availability in the marketplace over other things. If taxpayer money is going to prop up some company for its products, which means we pay more taxes for other things or ultimately it affects our pocketbook, I think that's of relevance to the average citizen.

When we're cutting welfare programs in inner cities, but we're giving agribusiness giants subsidies, that's a conscious decision to favor one form of welfare over another.

Q. Have you been able to find any politicians in all of your research who have admitted that they do owe corporations something in exchange for campaign contributions?

A. The closest that I've seen anyone get to that is in a book done by the Center for Responsive Politics. [They interviewed] 25 retired members of Congress. And I have talked to former members of Congress myself and I read that book, and they do acknowledge that they're under an incredible sense of obligation, and that it's terribly demeaning and it's almost impossible to function objectively dealing with issues.

None of them will admit that they've been influenced because, of course, that would be embarrassing and it could actually cause their defeat. And, it could be a felony if it's a specific question about a specific bill and a specific favor. So no politician is going to say that, and they don't say that.

It's true politicians will never admit it. Does that mean there isn't an obligation there [to return a favor in some way]? Of course there's an obligation. When politicians deny that, I find it insulting.

Take the gambling industry. We just did a study on gambling. When you look at the $2.5 million that has poured into Clinton and Dole and the two political parties since 1991, and then you [realize] neither political party nor its standard bearers favor any kind of tax on the gambling industry, could those things be related?

And you actually have several instances where Dole has gone to bat for the gambling industry, and you have a situation where the Clinton Administration clumsily at one point in 1994 proposed a tax to pay for welfare reform, but the gambling industry raised its head and was livid, and Clinton quickly dropped it.

That's just one industry. When you see that time and time again, industry to industry to industry, the idea that money is not a factor is simply an insult to our intelligence.

Q. And now you're coming to Illinois. What can you say about that?

A. I think I'm biased, but I think there's a certain magic that was achieved in the experiment we did in Indiana. I think there is a way to replicate some of the elements of the Indiana project in other states.

We want to make a stab at trying to work closely with the news media, work closely with the data [from Illinois], and come out with information of direct, vital, day-to-day relevance to Illinois citizens.

We think there are some things that we do generally and some things we did in Indiana that could be of use to Illinois.

And I have to tell you as a student of political science, who majored in political science, I love politics in general, and I can't think of a more fun state to do some work in.

Q. Why is that?

A. Well, because of Chicago, and because Illinois is easily among the top two or three most interesting states in America when it comes to politics: with its colorful anecdotes and a history [that includes] statesmanship, some truly gigantic figures of history, and some of the seamiest underside of American politics.

Q. And the amounts of money in Illinois are far greater than the amounts you looked at in Indiana?

A. Five or six times greater. You have a fascinating mix of urban and rural. Illinois is one of the largest states and also one of the most significant political states vis-a-vis the nation. The media dynamic is a little different there, also.

Ed Wojcicki, publisher of Illinois Issues, directs the Illinois Campaign Finance Project in collaboration with the Institute for Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The project, sponsored by the magazine, is supported by a grant from the Joyce Foundation.

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