Saturday, December 08, 2007
Three Billion Penny Oprah
Oprah Winfrey went to Iowa today to attend two huge campaign rallies for Barak Obama. There she gave her enthusiastic campaign endorsement for Obama to huge cheering crowds of “her people”. Now the issue that this raises in my mind is one of campaign donation limits. My understanding is that no single individual can give any one campaign more than $1,000 in hard money (and $5,000 in soft money to PACs). But Oprah is giving a donation-in-kind that is obviously worth many millions. Plus she is obviously spending much more than $1,000 in hard dollars just to be in Iowa with her posse (make-up artist, hair dresser, body guards, pilots, drivers, etc). Is this right? Does this lie within the spirit or even the letter (can't even be construed “soft money”) of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform bill? I think not. Will anyone object? I think not. (By the bye, I would not be unhappy if Obama were to knock off Hillary … who is obviously also getting huge donations-in-kind from her lothario husband.) But I raise this issue to show how will-o-the-wisp such attempts at “campaign finance reform” really are.
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2 comments:
Andrea Robinson commented:
Good Morning!
Well, I'm looking at it like this...may the best man (or woman) win. I think Oprah can do whatever the hell she wants to do with HER money. She worked hard for it and somehow, people always end up having a problem with that. Let's concentrate on getting someone elected who can actually do something for our country. Let's really concentrate on that.
By the way, it wasn't only "her people" that attended the rally.
By "her people" I meant her TV audience, not blacks. You shouldn't be so sensitive. (And I thought you knew me better than that.)
And she is constrained by law from what she can do with her money ... she can't hire a hit man or bribe a congressman, etc. And the election laws say she can't give more than $1,000 in hard money to any one candidate. My point is that her personal appearance for Obama is worth millions. Should such personal appearances also be constrained (remember all the basketball players who endorsed Bill Bradley for President) OR should such silly laws as McCain/Feingold be eliminated entirely as being anti-free-speech? (In which case, her appearance would have been OK by me.)
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