Matt Yglesias

GOP Mad at Palin Spending Spree

If Sarah Palin wants to bilk the RNC’s donors out of tens of thousands of dollars in designer clothes, that’s her business as far as I’m concerned. It does, however, certainly further complicate efforts to portray a woman with a six figure household income and a personal airplane as a simple country gal with working class tastes. Marc Ambinder reports that Republicans are none-too-happy with this turn:

There is already an attempt to blame the media — as in, the liberal media would have looked askance at Palin if she wasn’t clad in Neiman Marcus, but this won’t wash. Republicans, RNC donors and at least one RNC staff member have e-mailed me tonight to share their utter (and not-for-attribution) disgust at the expenditures.

This sort of spending is without precedent — the closest approximation for any campaign I’ve ever covered is make-up expenses for television interviews and commercial shoots — , and Schmitt’s weakly defensive response tonight indicates that the campaign is deeply embarrassed by it and has nothing to say in their defense. Spokespeople have clammed up, a sure sign that they’re trying to figure out who authorized the expenses and who knew about them. Did Palin wear all of the clothing? Where is it kept?

It seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to assess who authorized the expenses. Don’t people keep records of that kind of thing?

Scandal!

John McCain on Barack Obama’s fundraising success: “I’m saying that history shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal.”

I’m a supporter of full public financing of political campaigns. I can only hope that John McCain’s experience of getting pummeled at fundraising will lead him to join that cause. For years, though, McCain’s been opposed to that kind of far-reaching reform, thinking that the only good kind of campaign finance reform is the kind that’s predicted to give the Republican Party an edge.

Meanwhile, I’m a little bit confused about the prospects for corruption here. In September, Barack Obama raised about $150,000,000. His average donor gave him $86 or 0.0000573 percent of the total. The maximum contribution anyone could have given him was $2,300 which comes out to 0.00092 percent of the total September haul. Someone responsible for 0.00092 percent of Obama’s total warchest doesn’t have any meaningful levers of influence over Obama. The nature of a huge haul from a giant pool of donors is that there’s no real prospect for corruption.

I think you could fairly say that issues of corruption aside, the Obama Method is still troubling insofar as it involves a systematic class bias in favor of politicians who appeal to the kind of people likely to make campaign contributions — i.e., relatively prosperous people. Of course this problem also applies to the way McCain is financing his campaign. The only solution would be full public financing of campaigns. Which would be a good idea. But it’s an idea McCain has long opposed.

McCain Tapped Freddie Lobbyist as Chief of Staff

John McCain likes to talk about how, years ago, he spoke out about potential problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But how is it that as these issues grew more urgent, we didn’t hear much of anything about this from him until, grasping at straws amidst a crisis, he decided to use Fannie and Freddie as a political attack? Well, The Washington Post’s Matthew Mosk and David S. Hilzenrath know what’s what:

When mortgage giant Freddie Mac feared several years ago that Sen. John McCain was too outspoken on the issue of executive pay, it pinpointed a lobbyist known for his closeness to McCain and hired him to work with the senator. Mark Buse, a longtime McCain adviser who had been staff director of the Senate commerce committee, signed on as a Freddie Mac lobbyist, and his firm, ML Strategies, earned $460,000 in lobbying fees in late 2003 and 2004, according to lobbying disclosures. Buse is now chief of staff at McCain’s Senate office.

Typically with this sort of story the most you can get is a kind of guilt by association. But in this case, Buse was hired by Freddie Mac specifically in order to influence McCain. Of course since McCain is an honorable man above the influence of influence-peddlers (did you know he was in Vietnam?) it’s fine for him to do this sort of thing. But if it were someone else, this would be corrupting.

Davis and Fannie

A lot of us had the idea that John McCain was vastly overstating the role that Fannie Mae played in creating the current financial mess out of political opportunism as Fannie’s been a kind of weird business that, unlike most other large firms, has generally had closer ties to Democrats than to Republicans. But then you read something like this:

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

Given that, maybe McCain has double super-secret inside information gleaned straight from the mouth of a top GSE lobbyist.

The Answer Revealed

I’ve been wondering for a while now what it is, substantively, that Sarah Palin would bring to a McCain administration. This old article from December 2007 explains McCain’s thinking:

McCain said his staff hates it when he discusses his shortcomings on economics, even though he has read widely and studied the subject.

“I’ve never been involved in Wall Street, I’ve never been involved in the financial stuff, the financial workings of the country, so I’d like to have somebody intimately familiar with it,” he said of a potential vice president.

It was a bit prescient of him to recognize that familiarity with the world of finance was a quality he’d need to add to his team. That surely explains why he went with Alaska governor and former local TV news sportscaster Sarah Palin rather than, say, Mitt Romney who wouldn’t have been able to contribute on that front.