Mr. Soros's Millions =Sunday, November 23, 2003; Page B06
BILLIONAIRE FINANCIER George Soros may be the new central banker of the Democratic Party. He's given $10 million to America Coming Together, a Democratic voter mobilization group aimed at defeating President Bush. He pledged another $2.5 million to the liberal group Moveon.org for a television advertising campaign highlighting "Bush policy failures," and as much as $3 million to a new Democratic think tank, the Center for American Progress. Which leads to obvious questions: This is campaign finance reform? Wasn't the whole point of the new campaign finance law to get big checks of this kind out of politics? Are these huge donations healthy for small-d democracy, not just big-D Democrats?
The central reform of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation was to stem the tidal wave of "soft money" contributions from wealthy individuals, corporations and labor unions to political parties: Each party raked in about $250 million in such checks in 2000. It was inevitable that some of this money would shift to outside groups. Indeed, the groups had become players even during the heyday of party soft money. Now, they've become even more important. That's particularly true for Democrats because of the GOP's advantage in hard money, the limited-dollar contributions that remain available to parties.
The emergence of these groups doesn't mean the campaign finance law was for naught. McCain-Feingold severed the toxic link between big checks and politicians. Politicians can't solicit money for these outside groups, and the groups are limited in plotting strategy with candidates or parties. Republicans are angling to make the Soros-backed groups look like a Democratic end run around McCain-Feingold, but Republicans and their allies haven't been shy about using such entities in the past, and that's apt to be true in the 2004 campaign as well. A critical question will be whether the money goes to groups that are required to disclose their receipts and spending (so-called 527s), such as most of those backed by Mr. Soros, or whether the checks will flow to nonprofit groups that don't have to reveal their finances -- a far more dangerous development.
There remains something unsettling about those Soros checks. Mr. Soros, who spent $5 billion to promote democracy around the world and $18 million to spur campaign finance reform in this country, told The Post's Laura Blumenfeld that defeating Mr. Bush is "the central focus of my life." True, there is a difference between a check motivated by an ideological worldview and one prompted by economic self-interest. But such outsize voices, on the left or right, pose dangers to a democratic system: No one wants one deep-pocketed person picking the next president. For Democrats thrilled with the Soros millions, imagine conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife opening his bank account on behalf of Mr. Bush.
"I do not represent any special interest," Mr. Soros says. "My contributions are made in the public interest." Mr. Soros may not be seeking a rider on an appropriations bill, but who is he to determine the public interest?
The Soros donations point up another problem: Disclosure is critical to an effective campaign finance system, yet no information about Mr. Soros's recent generosity will be on the public record until February, when the next reports are due. Mr. Soros has been commendably open about his gifts, but if a wealthy donor wanted to make a big and stealthy splash during the primaries, the information wouldn't be public until after Iowa and New Hampshire. Remember Republicans for Clean Air, the mystery group that attacked John McCain during the 2000 primaries? That episode prompted Congress to require that such groups report their activities, though the nonprofit loophole remains. It would be a minor change, with a big payoff, to require that these shadow political parties follow the same disclosure schedule as the parties themselves.
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