Scandalous

If the campaign finance system is scandalous, let’s treat it that way

By Paul Waldman

Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News today brings us what ought to be a blockbuster campaign finance story — and if that sounds like an oxymoron, well, that’s part of the problem.

It concerns Scott Walker, the interest one particular billionaire took in making sure he stayed in office, and the governor’s relationship to a group that became a conduit for millions of dollars in donations to him. We’ll get to what this means for the 2016 race — not just when it comes to Walker, but to all the candidates — in a moment, but here are the details:

John Menard Jr. is widely known as the richest man in Wisconsin. A tough-minded, staunchly conservative 75-year-old billionaire, he owns a highly profitable chain of hardware stores throughout the Midwest. He’s also famously publicity-shy — rarely speaking in public or giving interviews.

So a little more than three years ago, when Menard wanted to back Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — and help advance his pro-business agenda — he found the perfect way to do so without attracting any attention: He wrote more than $1.5 million in checks to a pro-Walker political advocacy group that pledged to keep its donors secret, three sources directly familiar with the transactions told Yahoo News.

Menard’s previously unreported six-figure contributions to the Wisconsin Club for Growth — a group that spent heavily to defend Walker during a bitter 2012 recall election — seem to have paid off for the businessman and his company. In the past two years, Menard’s company has been awarded up to $1.8 million in special tax credits from a state economic development corporation that Walker chairs, according to state records.

And in his five years in office, Walker’s appointees have sharply scaled back enforcement actions by the state Department of National Resources — a top Menard priority. The agency had repeatedly clashed with Menard and his company under previous governors over citations for violating state environmental laws and had levied a $1.7 million fine against Menard personally, as well as his company, for illegally dumping hazardous wastes.

And it wasn’t just Menard. There’s another story about a mining company owner from Florida who wanted to open an iron ore mine in Wisconsin; he made a $700,000 donation to the Wisconsin Club For Growth while lobbying the legislature to authorize the mine. According to documents obtained by prosecutors, Walker personally solicited contributions to the Wisconsin Club for Growth; as one of Walker’s aides wrote to the governor in an email before a fundraising trip, “Stress that donations to WiCFG [Wisconsin Club for Growth] are not disclosed and can accept corporate donations without limits…Let them know you can accept corporate contributions and it is not reported.”

This is an ongoing case, and it may or may not turn out that Walker ever ran afoul of campaign finance laws. But there’s one thing we can say for sure: there will be a flood of outside money into the 2016 presidential race, both in the primaries and the general election. The question is whether the journalists covering the campaign will do the necessary reporting to help the public understand what’s actually happening.

Some political reporters — and there are plenty of notable exceptions — tend to look on campaign finance issues with a kind of head-shaking resignation: the system is inherently corrupt, it constantly gets worse, and voters don’t much care. That isn’t to say they won’t write about it at all, just that campaign finance stories won’t be pursued with the kind of dogged determination given to topics like Hillary Clinton’s emails.

There was a good amount of reporting on this issue in 2012, because that was the first post-Citizens United presidential campaign, and a lot of what was going on was new. With the innovation of the super PAC, it became possible for someone like Sheldon Adelson to single-handedly prop up a candidate’s campaign (he gave $20 million to a pro-Gingrich super PAC, and spent as much as $150 million on the campaign overall). Because that novel situation helped determine the shape and flow of the primary race, it was given plenty of space in the news media.

But there’s a danger that reporters won’t find much new and interesting about the 2016 version of our appalling campaign finance system. Since the money will be going both to groups that are required to disclose their donors and those that aren’t, it will take substantial shoe-leather to unearth all the different ties that bind the candidates to the millionaires and billionaires who are investing in them.

It may not be a story with all the sexiness of the latest exchange of insults and faux outrage between campaigns. But it’s far more important in the long run. It’s often said that when it comes to campaign finance, the real scandal is what’s legal, and I’m sure most reporters think that’s true. So they ought to treat that story the same way they treat the rest of the trivial things we give the name “scandal.”