Clinton’s campaign finance flip-flop-flip: Coming soon to a primary race near you
Any minute now, a Hillary Clinton Super PAC will once again turn a corporate-and-special-interest engorged firehose onto Bernie Sanders, washing away what little campaign finance reform credibility she has left.
EDIT on 4/21. Just as predicted, “Correct the Record” is pouring at least another $1M into grassroots-bots to fight Bernie Sanders’ authentic supporters.
It’s possible that her second wave of super PAC spending in the Democratic primary is already on it’s way, as the contest moves into the pricey media markets in the northeast, even as the Clinton campaign’s fundraising lags even further behind Bernie Sanders’ small-donation-powered juggernaut.
It’s not likely that Priorities USA would announce the move to the press, as it did after spending millions to help Clinton sweep the March 15 rust-belt primaries, telling Politico’s Gabriel Debendeti it would “cease pumping resources into the upcoming Democratic primary contests after spending over $5 million in February and March.”
I suppose the idea was that Sanders was finished anyway, and that it wasn’t great for ‘optics,’ for Clinton to claim to be a campaign finance reform crusader while spending millions in corporate and special interest money against an opponent who is actually walking the walk.
“In a way, the Koch brothers have more credibility than Clinton on election money issues — they’re at least upfront about how they want to use money to buy politics,” Dylan Ratigan, author of New York Times bestseller Greedy Bastards told the Center for Public Integrity, which is up with its own scathing report on Clinton’s campaign finance hypocrisy this morning.
“It’d be like tobacco companies coming out and saying they wanted to fight against lung cancer,” Ratigan said.
The incentive to use the Super PAC will only grow since the scrappy Sanders campaign isn’t just treading water, it’s gaining ground both in pledged delegates and in national polls, two of which yesterday had him up over Clinton in likely voters, by one point and two points, respectively.
A new poll out today by The Atlantic/PRRI had Sanders up by one as well, but also included new information showing that far more Clinton supporters like Sanders than Sanders supporters like the former Secretary of State:
Much of the low-hanging fruit for the Clinton campaign has already been plucked: donors who early and easily maxed out their $2,700 limit. Contrast that with Sanders, whose average donation is literally 100 times less than that, setting up a powerful cycle of repeat donations from millions of less-affluent supporters.
Millionaires and billionaires have no such limitations on contributions to the super PACs enabled by Citizen’s United, a 2010 Supreme Court decision that Clinton has decried and claims to want to overturn. Yet Clinton is the first Democratic candidate to actively raise money for a Super PAC and also the first to spend against a primary opponent. (Obama, who more passively accepted Super PAC help in 2012 against Mitt Romney, didn’t face a primary challenge.)
What does it say when a candidate who claims to want corporate and special interest money out of politics spends such large sums of it against a candidate who is courageously running without a Super PAC, fueled only by small donor contributions?
Maybe, since Hillary Clinton is already one of the least trusted politicians in the history of polling, she figures she doesn’t have any integrity left to lose.
