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McCain: Obama cash will lead to scandal
John McCain suggested that his Democratic rival Barack Obama’s record-shattering fundraising haul will lead to scandal in their presidential race and future races, and he hinted that there may already be funny business going on with Obama’s legions of small donors.
Obama announced Sunday morning that he pulled in $150 million in September, which McCain described on “Fox News Sunday” as “completely breaking whatever idea we had after Watergate to keep the cost and spending on campaigns under control. First time, first time since the Watergate scandal. And I can tell you this: that has unleashed now in presidential campaigns a new flood of spending that will then cause a scandal and then we will fix it again. But Sen. Obama has broken it.”
The Republican senator from Arizona was referring both to Obama’s reversal on a pledge to participate a system that gave McCain’s campaign $84 million in taxpayer money but limited his spending to that amount, and also to recent news reports highlighting over-the-limit contributions to Obama given in under-$200 installments from previously undisclosed small donors. Some were fictitious and had listed names such as “Doodad Pro” and “Good Will.”
Federal election rules only require campaigns to report the names, addresses and occupations of donors when they have given more than $200 — and more than $200 million of Obama’s total fundraising haul is from such small contributions.
“We know that when you have unlimited amounts of money — in this case $200 million unreported — and there’s already been stories of people who have made small contributions multiple times and all that. I’m saying it’s laying a predicate for the future that can be very dangerous,” McCain told host Chris Wallace in a live interview from Ohio on Sunday morning, blasting the Illinois senator for not voluntarily disclosing his small donors, as McCain has done.
“There’s $200 million of those campaign contributions — there’s no record. You can report online now. Two hundred million that we don’t know where it came from. Lot of strange things going on in this campaign. The American people should know where every penny came from,” McCain said. “They know where every penny of my campaign contributions came from.”
McCain also defended his campaign’s controversial robocalls hitting Obama for his past association with former 1960s radical Bill Ayers, saying the calls are “legitimate and truthful” and “far different” than the robocalls attacking him during his failed bid for the GOP nomination in 2000.
And McCain challenged Wallace’s assertion that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin had become “a drag” on the GOP ticket.
“As a cold political calculation, I could not be more pleased,” McCain said, calling Palin “a direct counterpoint to the liberal feminist agenda for America” and asserting “she’s the best thing that could have happened to my campaign and to America.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081019/pl_politico/14719
