Actor rejects need to identify all donors now
By Barry Witt and Mary Anne Ostrom
Mercury News
Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger said Friday it shouldn't matter to voters if they know who all his campaign donors are before the Oct. 7 recall election.
``You know something, when the voters vote for me they're voting for me because they trust me. Always when you vote for somebody you have to have trust,'' Schwarzenegger said in an interview. He was responding to criticism earlier this week that he had exploited a campaign-finance loophole by loaning $4.5 million to his campaigns with the expectation that donors would repay him later.
``I will always let anyone know whatever checks come in,'' said Schwarzenegger, who has made political reform a major theme of his campaign. ``They can see it. What does it matter if they read it now? . . . If it is before or after the election, the rules will stay the same. I will not take money from the special interests, from any of the unions, or Indian gaming.''
Proposition 34, the voter-approved campaign-finance measure, prohibited candidates from making loans of more than $100,000 to their campaigns. The purpose was to ensure that candidates would have to make public the names of people funding their campaigns before the election. But the state Fair Political Practices Commission decided last year that the limit did not apply if a candidate obtained a personal loan from a bank and flipped it to his campaign.
``Personal loans are troublesome because, unlike direct contributions by the candidate to his own campaign, they raise the prospect that a winning candidate will raise contributions after the election to pay himself back from groups that have interests in front of him as a newly elected official,'' Jim Knox, executive director of California Common Cause, wrote in e-mail Friday to reporters.
``This prevents the public from knowing the identity of a candidate's financial backers until after the election, and also creates the impression that those contributions will be more influential,'' Knox wrote. |
