Good morning, and welcome to the New America Foundation. My name is Mark Schmidt. I'm a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and I think I'm a senior research fellow here at New America, where I worked for a number of years, a couple of years ago. And we've, I'll pull Andres Martinez, the Vice President of New America, and Elizabeth Wangartin, and I have pulled together a good panel on what's really going on with money and politics in 2012, and we called it Beyond Sticker Shock, because the idea is to kind of get beyond just the basic idea of, oh my gosh, there's a huge amount of money here in politics. I remember when I first got involved in this issue in 1996, I was working on The Hill, and my boss wanted to do a big speech about it, and we were, I remember writing this whole section of like, how outrageous it was that was a billion, one billion dollars would be spent on the election in 1996, and of course, now that begins to seem like, you know, the line from, you know, Dr. Evil's one demand for one million dollars to not take over the world. So what we're gonna do here is a little, a couple very brief presentations, and then really an open-ended panel discussion. And the first presentation will be Michael Sherer from Time Magazine.  I'm gonna run through a little bit of a, some of the questions that I think we might wanna be asking that are sort of the Beyond Sticker Shock questions. Do that pretty quickly. And then we'll be joined by Trevor Potter, Katherine Mangue Ward, who's a, Trevor Potter is a partner of Kaplan and Drysdale and often known as the lawyer for Stephen Colbert's Super PAC. Probably many of us have known him for many years, but now the world knows him. And Katherine Mangue Ward is a fellow here at New America and the managing editor of Reason Magazine. So hopefully in addition to moderating, she will also provide some provocation, which is always, always useful. So with no more ado, I'm gonna thank you all for coming and turn it over to Michael. I'm one who knew Trevor when he was a lawyer for John McCain, which I thought was a pretty important job, but nothing like being a lawyer for Stephen Colbert. Maybe one day I can say I work for Comedy Central too and people will be impressed. I just wanna give a brief overview. This is actually a graphic that we ran in Time Magazine at the end of July this summer, trying our best at that moment in time to project out where the money would come from and what the differences would be in terms of the various sides. And there were a couple of points we were trying to make in this graphic. One that there is a real difference in political money strategy that these campaigns are employing this cycle. The Obama campaign is heavily reliant on small dollars, individual dollars, regulated money, that is contributions under $2,500 from individuals. That the campaign then has total control over and can spend as they want. The exception here is the priorities USA, which you can barely see because of the chairs, which we were saying maybe would make 60 million. Earlier priorities had been saying they'd wanted to make 100 million and they had to pair that back. There just weren't a lot of wealthy liberals and Democrats coming forward to give them money. In recent weeks, there's been a little bit of a turnaround there. They've been picking up steam, but it's nothing compared to what the Republicans have had on their side. And there are a few different factors going on here. Traditionally, it's easier to raise money for a no than for a yes. So it's easier to raise money when you're out of power because you have an angry donor base who really wants to get back in power and are motivated. And that's definitely true with Republicans this year. You have a large class of mostly private business entrepreneurs who have ponied up significant amounts of money for various different reasons. Some of them are just friends of Mitt Romney who know him from private equity days who support him and like him and wanna be there. Some of them are hedge fund givers who were big supporters of Barack Obama in 2008 but have soured on Obama and switched teams. Some come from industries that have significant government interests, oil, gas and coal are one of them. Restore Futures received a bunch of money from payday lenders who are very concerned about the Consumer Financial Production Bureau regulating them and are hoping for a Romney win which would ease some of that. On the Democratic side, there just isn't that collection of people right now. Now it doesn't mean that at no point in the future will there be a large amount of very wealthy liberals because they're out there who will pony up money. It's just in this cycle, it's very uneven. The saving grace of the president is that he has, as he proved in 2008, uniquely able to raise enormous amounts of money in very small amounts from in political terms, enormous amounts of people. And we're talking now, I think we're up at three million donors for his campaign and just to give you an idea of how it differs from what Romney's been raising, this is through reports that came out, the primary fundraising through the end of August. Barack Obama had raised 147 million or 34% of his primary dollars from people who gave under $200. So these are people mostly going online or responding to text messages or being hit up by campaign aides as they walk precincts. And these donations depends on the month but they average in the $15, $20, $30 range. They're not much more than that but it adds up to an enormous amount of money. 147 million dollars or 34% of his take. Romney, so far this cycle, in a moment where you would think there's a lot of grassroots furies out there on the Republican side has been really disappointing among small-dollar donors. Much more disappointing than John McCain was in 2008 which was arguably a more difficult year for Republicans to get their base going. He's raised $40 million or 18% of his take. Within the campaign though, on the high end, something, the reverse has happened.  In 2008 it was $2,300 the max you could give. This cycle is $2,500 but so far or through the end of August, Obama had raised $70 million or just 16% of his haul from that group. Romney, on the other hand, is incredibly good at raising money from people who can part with $2,500 after taxes. He's raised $102 million or 46%, almost half of his haul through the end of August was coming from people who had maxed out on their donations. And that's reflected also in the, Superac, many of the people who are fundraisers and bundlers for Romney give the max to him, bundle from their friends and colleagues and people they work with, other money and then write a check for 100,000 or 200,000 or more to one of the super PACs on the outside. So the question is sort of what does this mean for politics? Is this increase in the outside dollar spending transforming politics going forward? And I think the answer so far is a little complicated. The driving force, one of the driving forces behind this is a Supreme Court decision which Trevor can talk about much better than me called Citizens United and then some lower court decisions which basically allowed outside money much easier access to our airwaves right before an election. So the barriers that were there, historically in the post Watergate era that prevented corporations and very wealthy people from pulling their money to spend huge amounts on television ads right before an election have largely gone away. And that has unleashed this outside spending spree. I am guessing and I don't know but I am guessing that in a few months when we look back on this election we will say that the peak of the power of these super PACs may have come not in the general election but in the primaries in which they really transform the Republican primary. In the case of two candidates Romney was running against Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, almost certainly those candidates would not have stayed in the race as long as they did, would not have been able to be viable candidates after losing several contests in each case without basically a millionaire or two or far or a billionaire backing them with checks as high as $5 million or $2 million, $500,000. And as a result the Republican primary was much more prolonged than it would have been. Romney and his friends had to spend much more money than they expected defending him in those early months and really the whole dynamic of what we're used to in early presidential politics where it's Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and we've got a nominee who's sort of upended for a few weeks there. Since then the super PACs stepped in in a huge way this summer when Romney wins the nomination he doesn't have the infrastructure with the fundraising base and he hasn't really raised the money that he needs to compete with Obama at that point. He relied heavily on super PACs through the summer months to do his advertising. Of course this was not technically coordinated advertising and Trevor can get into the legal realities and fictions there. And it had some clear obvious positive effect in holding parity with the president as he unleashed a sort of blistering attack against Romney this summer. But it also has shown to have clear weaknesses I think and both campaigns will tell you this. The super PAC advertising because it was not coordinated didn't follow a simple single narrative like the Obama advertising did. The Obama campaign built a storyline starting in April that tried to portray Romney as a certain type of person and then they presented as the months went on new evidence there's the Bain Capital chapter has period in time in Massachusetts the offshore tax havens and they built this storyline in these swing states that the super PACs because they were operating independently just weren't able to build and in some cases and Obama campaign people point out this out to me you had situations in which two different super PACs would have conflicting ads up in the same market both supporting that Romney you'd have one ad that says, I'm paraphrasing here obviously but one ad that says essentially that Barack Obama was a really nice guy who just couldn't get the job done and that's one of the attacks that's been used against him and then in the next commercial break you'll have an ad that says no Barack Obama is never a nice guy he's a radical socialist green energy lunatic who's trying to take your job and the result is like the more money actually didn't feed into a larger narrative in a way that I think the Romney campaign would have preferred. A second reason that the super PAC money is less effective now is that under FEC rules or FCC rules the super PACs campaigns are able to get lowest available rate for their advertising their television advertising right now because we're in the window right before an election super PACs are not able to do that so super PACs buying the same number of points in the same market are spending far more sometimes twice or three times as much as a campaign is to get the same money. The third reason I think that you're seeing super PACs being less effective now than they were early on is that in just the last month or two Obama because we're getting close to the election people are paying more attention to it because we have the conventions are waking up and giving more money in small dollars in a way that you don't really see happening in the super PACs at least not yet. I mean it may be that a bunch of people are gonna come in at the last minute with 10 million dollar checks but we haven't really seen that and so the small dollar fundraising model has actually been able to expand nicely for Obama as we get close to the end and on the other side Romney had to spend a good portion of September when he should have been out campaigning going to fundraisers trying to collect these $2,500 checks and he was being very successful at raising a lot of money but it really was a strategic disadvantage at that point in the race. We can get into some of the other questions here but the other thing I would say is that I do think there is going to be an interesting political legacy question of this election. We have had in all the elections I've covered and I started doing campaign finance reporting for Mother Jones magazine in 2000 when it was a totally different world of soft money but there have always been wealthy people with large checks putting money into our political system in some way or another and so technically it's not a brand new ball game but I think the increased visibility of the super PACs the degree to which the campaigns can now basically raise money for the super PACs if they follow certain set of fictional rules and the visibility of these ads whereas a lot of the money fundraising before from wealthy people went into things you didn't see on TV has raised this issue profile for the public and you've seen the president a few weeks ago come out and say that he would like to see explore the possibility of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United which is a pretty striking when a politician pulls the constitutional amendment card you know, at least in this case I think that he sees it as a real political winner for him over the long haul and there have been some polling that came out recently that there is concern among the public. There are not a lot of people who think these giant checks are good. What we haven't seen yet and which I fully expect if this regime continues over another decade or so are the real corruption scandals which tend to follow this sort of thing but you need time for that to happen you need the money to be given and then the politician to act to repay the donor and then the questions to be raised whether it's actually prosecutable corruption or just the clear appearance of corruption that makes the voting public upset. There's also a lot of, my last point is there's a lot of concern among Democrats specifically that going into 2016 and after what happened in the Republican primary this time there is a huge barrier to overcome. Obama was always going to be pretty much fine.  He was not gonna be at a huge disadvantage but if you have a playing field next time in which either both parties are running from the ground up or Democrats running against a Republican incumbent from the ground up it's difficult to see how any candidate can really get into the race without having a few very wealthy friends and that really changes that the whole way politics is done in these early primary states that basically you need your billionaire or your hundred millionaire and there's a real concern among Democrats that that will self-select the candidates they're able to get into the race or worse sort of lead the country into this on the path towards a situation in which not just wealthy people not just people who can give $2,500 checks but people who can give a million dollar or five million dollar checks or 10 million dollar checks I mean the numbers will keep going up have increasing control over the political process and Democrats at least right now that I've talked to are interested in provoking a backlash against that potential I'll hand the mic back. Thank you Michael that was fantastic. I just wanna sort of set some context here by really talking about some of the questions we might ask about how things are really different in 2012 as Michael said this is there've always been wealthy contributors to politics but certainly some things are different and those things are not just citizens united although that's certainly part of it the speech now decision which really most directly created super PACs as part of it the absence of rules about coordination between campaigns and super PACs is a big part of it but together they've returned us to a world that on the face of it looks a lot like the pre-watergate world of campaigns being supported often by a relatively small number of wealthy individuals with the big difference being that the sticker shock actually that the number is probably six or seven billion in total the number I was able to find in pre-watergate 1968 or so was about 300 billion being spent on 300 million I'm sorry being spent on all federal campaigns of course that's kind of before the 70s inflation so I'd have to really work that out and what this creates is a situation of where the enormous economic inequality we see is reinforced by political inequality I mean it's not the 1% that's giving to campaigns it's about a fifth of the top 1% that's giving $200 or more to campaigns an even smaller amount giving $2,500 or more so you really have the potential for economic and political inequality kind of reinforcing themselves in a kind of self-perpetuating structure and you have situations I like to not talk about corruption and appearance of corruption so much as the term Lawrence Larry Lessig uses which is dependence you have situations where elected officials are going to be wholly dependent on individual donors and that creates all kinds of potential for the public interest to not be served I just want to have a little paper out front with that title beyond sticker shock and what it really tries to do is lay out what are some questions that we want to be asking particularly after the election when we begin to have the real data I mean this is a funny time to have this conversation because we're sort of in the middle of the stream but once we really begin to get the data after the election and the final reports and some time to analyze it I think the things we want to be looking at and these questions kind of are both for journalists and academic researchers about money in politics and then also for people thinking about what are the reforms, what are the changes you do want to make in the future and kind of go in order from that First question would be how has money really affected competition this year? As Michael pointed out, money did an interesting thing Super PAC money did an interesting thing in the Republican primaries it actually kept some campaigns competitive where in the past they wouldn't be I have a great, sometimes he's a great quote from 1988 a guy had been I think Dukakis' campaign chair said candidates don't, he was talking about presidential primaries, he said candidates don't lose elections they run out of money and can't get their airplanes off the ground and that's a very good description of presidential politics in past cycles in fact probably the reason Dukakis was the Democratic nominee in 1988 was because all the other guys ran out of money and this isn't limited of course to presidential politics and we shouldn't just limit it to presidential politics so the interesting question would be how was competition affected in congressional races for example were there more competitive candidates as a result of actually the massive flow of money both large money and in fact small contributions were more candidates able to reach kind of the threshold of competitiveness which is really how political scientists think of money in politics it's not like playing the card game of war where if you have a higher number you win it's really a pretty subtle thing do you reach the threshold where you can be heard and at a certain point extra money isn't doing you any good so the real question is how many reach is probably about last year the average non-incumbent winner in a congressional race raised 1.5 million that's people who won either an open seed or defeated an incumbent you wanna look at how many people reached basically that level and how many candidates were actually had a shot but were overwhelmed by super PAC spending we wanna look at a very subtle and complicated question really how does money affect polarization political polarization and that really doesn't really get talked about enough but clearly that's a big part of what's going on in Washington right now you have some of the big super PAC donors are clearly much more ideologically driven somebody like Sheldon Adelson or Foster Fries much more ideologically driven than the soft money donors of the late 1990s how does that affect things and these big money air battles tend to create kind of intractable positions so the question would be has that effect in polarization that's a much more subtle question than the one above another interesting question is the automatic instinct is to go to broadcast ads are the big cost of politics they always will be it's the only way to reach that person who is they're not seeking out political information but they will vote and they're more and they're way verbal now that's probably less than 5% of the people who will vote in November and it's probably shrinking as we again as we become polarized so that in a base election actually getting your vote out becomes vastly more important than getting to that 5% so a lot of the money activities that go into the kinds of organizations that are either based on getting the vote out or actually based on reducing the vote there's a new organization called True the Vote that's clearly intended to make it difficult for people to vote things like that we need to begin to look at that and those are organizations that often operate under a very different set of legal structures than the classic PACs we do want to look at have corporations changed their behavior what a lot of people thought would really happen after Citizens United where people would say ExxonMobil is going to put $11 billion into these super PACs generally hasn't happened corporations have been about 17% of the total spending most of those are privately held corporations so the individual swollen them could give from their own pocket or the corporation doesn't matter that much but what have corporations done have they become a little more polarized themselves I looked at some of the data most corporations generally corporations like to play both sides of the fence with a few exceptions a lot of them have been at about 60, 40 one party or the other this year a lot of them are a little closer to 80, 20 you may be seeing a little more partisanship or you may be seeing as in the case of for example of Aetna where we found out about some of the outside contributions that they were making that they're kind of bipartisan on the face of it and partisan in the non-disclosed contributions they're able to make through 501 C4s it is interesting to know it's kind of news that there's really are still some downsides just to putting money through super PACs they used to be considerable downsides because you couldn't control the message and candidates don't like not being able to control the message now you can clearly control the message but the fact that you're not getting the lowest unit rate as Michael talked about the fact that the super PACs are not able to buy air time at the same price ProPublica's study showed that the Romney super PACs were paying six times as much as the Obama campaign for the same time totally blunts that advantage that's an interesting development and may make people think differently about super PACs do small donors still matter in the campaign? Clearly as Michael pointed out and data from the campaign finance institute shows small donors are still a very significant part of at least the Obama campaign really be interesting to see how many congressional candidates actually are able to build a base of small donors and that extends to what is really one of the most interesting areas of reform which is can we use that to build reform initiatives that enhance the value of small donors that encourage candidates to seek out small donors and enhance the value of small donors similar to New York City's matching fund system for small donors as a great system in Minnesota which unfortunately has been defunded but for a long time gave people in a sense a voucher for a small contribution it was a instantly refundable tax credit a lot of people have moved to thinking that's a really viable way of thinking about campaigns political scientist Norm Ornstein, Michael Malbin, Tony Carrado and Tom Mann put out a couple years ago this project called the age reform in the age of network campaigns that really called for boosting small donors some of the congressional legislation the Empower Citizens Act I think it's called that was just introduced are really based on that model so small donors are really still a viable way of building a campaign boosting them could be a really valuable way of thinking about reform unless the huge outside money actually overwhelms that so that's a question in itself if the blasts of money from super PACs kind of overwhelm the small donors that's not gonna work that leads some people to think you really need either a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United or the court to change its mind before some of these things can work but that's an empirical question and then finally just two last questions that really go to the politics of it the first is will campaign finance reform ever be a bipartisan project again? For years and years it was Trevor worked for Senator McCain there's a great legacy of that before there was McCain-Feingold there was Goldwater-Boren not only bipartisan but actually representing fairly conservative Republicans as well as as well as liberal as well as more moderate ones that hasn't that's not the case right now that even the Disclose Act a lot of Republicans used to say they were for disclosure but nothing else even the Disclose Act to approve disclosure now has zero Republican co-sponsors that had two in the previous Congress but it's possible I think after a significant shake up in this election maybe after people realize that super PACs aren't that valuable after all there could be some rethinking of the political alignments of that and finally the last piece what Michael alluded to is does the public actually care about this now? I mean I've been around this issue for 15 years but other people have been for longer it's been we've been waiting for people to care and all of a sudden the recent polling by Stan Greenberg and others suggest the public really does care quite passionately Greenberg had a line that said the public doesn't see money and politics as a distraction from the economy it is the economy so that that connection to economic inequality is strong on the other hand that public passion may make it harder to build the bipartisan alliances that traditionally have been needed so to my mind those are those are kind of that's kind of the range of questions that we need to be looking at after the election ends so now what we will do is answer all those questions we will all come up here and Catherine will lead this open ended discussion and stump us thank you for kicking us off with 10 million questions to answer I'm sure we'll be able to cover all of those in our short time here so I guess just to start out I think we're gonna get into some of the great like nitty gritty of this we're really gonna get down and dirty in the campaign finance details and I'm looking forward to that but maybe we could start just indulge a libertarian talk to me a little bit about free speech nobody mentioned that in their opening remarks perfectly reasonable but there's been this sort of macro debate in addition to the real hard money stuff about campaign finance which is speech freer now is it the right kind of speech is it corporate speech speech at all and maybe since Trevor has been our silent partner until now he can kick us off with that just indulge me with a little first amendment worship well I think that's the right place to start because we have a Supreme Court that's starting in the Buckley decision back in the 70s and obviously much more recently in Citizens United has used the first amendment as a way to disqualify a range of government restraints on both contributions and spending the first thing to say of course is we're all Americans we all believe in the first amendment the question is what is the first amendment and one of the things that I point out when I think about this is that we have a Supreme Court over the course of the last hundred years which has had a whole range of views of what the first amendment required and didn't require it so it isn't a black and white question you had a Supreme Court which for 35 years after the Buckley case said that corporations didn't have the same first amendment free speech rights as individuals and labor unions didn't as well and then with the change of one justice changed all that doctrine and decided oops that's wrong they do if you added up the number of justices who had voted over those years saying that they didn't have those rights compared to those who do the number of justices who say they don't is the winner so it isn't a clear yes or no the Supreme Court has made this distinction between contributions and expenditures for the first amendment and has said well they've said if you stand on the street corner that speech fine we all know that if you stand there with a amplified microphone bullhorn that's still speech even though you paid for it but they've said so they've said that line of logic means an individual and now a corporation standing on a street corner or using their money for their own speech radio ads, TV ads the hundreds of millions of dollars we're talking about that's all first amendment free speech on the other hand the same individual who turns around and takes the same money can be prevented from giving it to the candidate because the court says the first amendment speech there is lesser you are taking your money and you're handing it to someone else to spend and for them to decide what message they want the point that has been made about the super PAC versus the candidates and therefore it's not really your speech it's in some symbolic sense of saying yes I support this candidate by giving them my money but that could be $100 rather than a million so the court has said you can limit what individuals give to some other person or entity so what's the super PAC? Is it your own free speech? Is it giving a contribution to this entity where other people decide what to say and what to spend? Can it therefore be limited contrary to what the court said in speech now? These are all the first amendment questions that we deal with in when we get under the 50,000 foot level of the first amendment allows free speech does it allow unlimited contributions? The courts have said no is giving all this money to super PACs a contribution? I think there's a good argument that it is and finally the reason this matters is that we have a we hope, a democracy, a republic, a constitutional form of government where at the end of the day the president and the Congress have to make decisions on matters and we don't want them being in its grossest form we don't want them being bought off and I think the notion of a democracy is that people, citizens, voters get to set policy not special what we would call special interests other groups would call other countries would call oligarchs I got a call from a German reporter this summer and he said I want to interview you about the role of the oligarchs in the election and I thought wait a minute we're on country but you know there is this concept fundamentally that you want a Congress that represents the will of the people and isn't bought off and that's where reform started 100 years ago was the notion that you had the senator from Standard Oil and you shouldn't you should have the senator representing the citizens of New Jersey and Standard Oil was only one of the constituents of that senator so underlying this is the tension I think sometimes between the First Amendment when it comes to spending unlimited money versus corruption and the danger of corruption and people feeling that their government and its policies have been bought by a tiny minority of voters who represent a sizable economic interest Can I comment on this? Of course, I mean I think I yield I don't want to let libertarians own the First Amendment I mean I care about the First Amendment as well and it's one reason why I think incentives that boost small donors and other voices are a very important part of the solution but I see the issue as not just First Amendment or no First Amendment it's really an issue of how do we draw the boundaries around an election? What do you call the bounds of an election? That's the real challenge here and we've always had in thinking about the First Amendment a kind of what some scholars call electoral exceptionalism we have rules, elections are a structured process to make sure that they're fair and that people can be heard that's why you can't campaign within 75 feet of a voting booth for example which is certainly a restriction on speech but it's an important one and we've always, we accept that contribution limits are a way of balancing that out then the question really becomes what's out there that's really a contribution to really about the election? What might as well be considered a contribution directly to the election and what's external speech? That was the real challenge about the issue of the electioneering communications in McCain-Fyingelons award what's really all about just influencing the election and what's just free for all speech outside of that zone and the challenge is really defining that zone well and that's what I think it's about not just do you value free speech or not? If I could add to that, I think that's a nice analogy if you look at, so who's in the zone? We have established a constitution that says citizens vote, non-citizens do not vote that we came from, we were worried about European governments intervening in our new republic so the inner circle is that individual citizens are the people who vote then we've decided that if you have a green card you can contribute to candidates but not vote so you look at this and say okay foreigners can't have a role in our election the laws say they can't contribute they can't spend money they can't make an independent expenditure that's all reserved to individuals then I think you have to say so where are corporations in the middle of all this? They're not individuals they presumably are not foreigners although they may be owned by foreign corporations but that line of conversation assumes that the government should have a role in deciding who is in the circle whether it's who has the First Amendment rights or the rights to speak or the right to vote it's all a piece of that who gets to determine who our leaders are and I think that's what the conversation becomes Michael, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about in your earlier remarks you kind of described this problem for the campaigns of the fragmented narrative when you have many voices and they're independently funded and can't be coordinated sometimes the message is muddied as you were describing it I thought it actually sounded kind of great that there's this two models and one is this very disciplined there's one story this is the only story the public gets to hear and that's because of the way the money is flowing it's very specific to how the dollars are moving around and then in this other scenario we have kind of a bunch of people hollering and you could say that the money makes the voices louder it's the megaphone but I guess I wonder you gave a sort of purely strategic analysis but I'd like you to kind of bring some of your own judgment to it is this a good thing for the process for democracy for America it's clearly a bad thing for the Romney campaign in this cycle but the Romney campaign would say it's a bad thing maybe it's more aesthetically pleasing to have lots of people screaming instead of one narrative I mean if I were to answer the question is it better or worse I think I would probably go back to just for a way of judging that how well the public interest is served vis-a-vis the issue of corruption and the appearance of corruption which is something that as a journalist like there's two things you look for here first is you're frustrated by the lack of transparency what we haven't talked about here we're talking about super PACs there's tons of C4 or 501C4 money coming into these campaigns same giant checks many cases the same wealthy individuals there could be wealthy individuals we don't even know are on the radar they're only giving privately it's a huge problem and it's a huge problem just for a public accountability reason and if they're adding to the color and chorus of democracy but they're doing it in a way that fundamentally conceals who is speaking in a way that could distort the process I do think that's something the public or me as a journalist should be concerned about I want to know just for accountability's sake who is trying to push an election one way or the other and the other issue is this issue of I mean as I understand the Supreme Court decisions and the history here the First Amendment butts up against this issue of corruption the appearance of corruption when you said that we don't want our officials being bribed and the real issue with the super PACs as I see it this cycle is that in Citizens United the majority opinion said as a statement of fact that if you are a third party group like a super PAC and you're spending money on your own independently without technical coordination there is no corruption or appearance of corruption it's just not a concern we're going to rule out that possibility and I don't think the American people would agree with that I think if you look at the plain facts of the issue the idea that because someone who is a friend of Mitt Romney who gives money at an event where Mitt Romney speaks to a third party group to a group that says they're only going to do what the Mitt Romney campaign is publicly saying they're going to do in terms of public messaging that it ends up being a fictional wall between the campaigns and these third party groups and the real danger we don't know how it's going to play out but the real danger is that the politician who gets elected because of contributions from one wealthy person when he gets into office either does something that is not necessarily in the public interest but in the interest of repaying that donor and again if that happens I think the aesthetic beauty of having lots of people chiming in on my television as opposed to just one probably is less important how do you score that though with this with the claim that you made earlier that some of these big donors are increasingly they're in it for the ideology right so they're not in it because they want their company to get a tax break when it comes out the far side well at the very least we think that we will take as a stipulation at this moment in this debate that at least some of these guys who give money are doing it just because they believe in something and maybe that's a starry eye but I think it's real that at least in some cases this is really not about material consideration it's not to say that their beliefs don't sometimes line up with material considerations but that in those cases I think it's a little harder to tell this story of corruption you can still tell a story of influence you can still tell a story of the whole point of giving money to a candidate somewhere along the line is to change the way a policy is made in this country so that's never gonna go away but what do we do with the Sheldon Adelson's what do we do with the guys who are just saying listen I like policies X, Y, and Z and I wanna see more of that go for it buddy Sheldon Adelson is probably a bad example I think to use in that case just because he gave an interview recently with Politico in which he said there's the possibility these federal investigations into him he said they're outrageous, they're false they're not true and I'm convinced that if Obama wins they're gonna pursue these and so I'm giving money to defend myself we'll have a imaginary ideological donor but why not use the real one? no but I think your point because the real one has already been fought to death and I think this is a legitimate question there are people who would do this and the way to answer it is I think in having spent time in this you're right I think sometimes the press gets it wrong in sort of assuming that anybody who gives money is a bad person in it for themselves and that's just the assumption of the narrative you know you do the list of the ten you know big bad money people who are out to buy the election right and what the reality is is there are very different motivations from very different types of people there are basically ideological philanthropists who give every year because they feel you know they're wealthy people their careers are over they feel this is how they can do good in the world they don't really want anything back even if they get a tax break from politician they don't care about it I mean it's just not their motivating factor the problem for a policy standpoint from a legal standpoint is how do you distinguish from the outset the one guy from the other guy I mean I think it's important in telling the story to try and distinguish one guy from the other guy but a case of Adelson is a good case in that he clearly has ideological views philanthropic goals in terms of changing policies around the world and the situation around the world vis-a-vis Iran and other things he also has very real business interests he also has personal interests possibly I don't know the state of these investigations but possibly with federal investigators I just wouldn't know as a policy matter how to say okay if you check the box that says I'm really just in it for nothing then therefore you can give more money than the guy who works for the payday lender which is a pretty clear more clear-cut case who's facing a huge regulatory burden who's pulling their money for restore our future because Romney has promised them that if he's elected you know the Elizabeth Warren plan for payday lending will not go into effect I'm sure you've been kind of itching to get in here you wanna dive in? Well, some of this resembles the conversation we literally had a hundred years ago when the Wall Street trust selected Theodore Roosevelt because they thought that he would not enforce these new anti-trust laws against them that was ideological they didn't like William Jennings Bryan they probably thought he was a socialist but their view was that we want our thinking in the White House and in the Justice Department and we want someone who sees the economy hour away is that a business interest? Is that a philosophical ideological interest? After the election the great line that came out of that was Henry Clay Frick who said about Roosevelt we bought the son of a bitch he just didn't stay bought and Roosevelt ended up saying we ought to get rid of private money and presidential elections we ought to have public funding out of the treasury because trust corporations shouldn't be deciding who the president is I think if you look back at the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case what you see is a court that has two very different views the dissent and majority over what's happening and we see it played out this year we have your view which is a perfectly I think respectable view of aspirational that there will be all these independent groups and they will be speaking and they will be saying what they wanna say and that the candidates may like it they may dislike it but it's gonna be independent it's gonna be fully disclosed and it's not going to be corrupting because it's independent then you have the minority which I think got the reality of some of the spending maybe most of it this year but not all of it correct and their view was wait a minute these are gonna be funded by giant corporations that have a specific legislative interest or individuals who own giant corporations and that's why they're gonna give so much money it turns out it's not fully disclosed it turns out it's not independent of candidates in any common sense definition of independent and thus edges to and perhaps crosses the line to being corrupting but those are two different views of the world as Stephen said in his dissent you know it's interesting when I talk about corporations I think of international oil companies when the majority talks about corporations they talk about the corner hairdresser who just happens to be incorporated so it's sort of depended on which end of the telescope you look through how you saw this and I think in this election we're seeing examples of both which goes to Michael's question then of so how do you write a law that covers both? I have to say I am so rarely accused of being the one with the hopeful aspirational view of politics but it's really it's actually kind of refreshing I mean I guess what I'm interested in is you know we've sort of had this very compelling explanation of how hard it is to draw bright lines how everything is muddled how the corner hairdresser and the international oil company are you know in some sense fundamentally the same and yet clearly very different but how their speeches you know in some sense speech and in some sense not and I would add you know what exactly is the difference between you know when I go in the ballot box and I and I vote purely on my personal economic self-interest if I just say I don't want my taxes to be higher and I think this guy's gonna make them lower why is that different than someone saying I don't want the taxes on my corporation to be higher and I think this will make them lower but all of this sounds to me like an argument to stop trying to write these incredibly complex rules that people just work around so I guess I'm interested maybe you could step in here and just say you know what is the case for rules what is the vision of rules that work well I mean I think part of it let's take a slightly different example on this distinction between ideological and self-interested donors because I don't think that's that important let's say for example you have hedge fund some hedge fund donor lives in Connecticut gave a lot of money to Obama in 2008 because he's socially liberal, environmentalist all those things now he's turned around he's decided Obama hates bankers it's all awful he's giving the same amount of money to Romney he's still a donor he's got his interests either way his economic interest I mean I don't really care about that distinction so much and frankly if a politician's views I find it I actually found it quite shocking to see Governor Romney in a speech with Shailton Adelson in the very front row taking a set of positions about the Middle East that to say the least box him in in a way that presidents don't usually want to be boxed in on foreign policy I mean without taking a position on any of those particular positions it was a rather tight commitment that Mitt Romney made with a donor nodding in the front row I'm as troubled by that as if he makes a commitment to end investigations against Shailton Adelson or I have an argument with a friend of mine like is Shailton Adelson more interested in destroying unions or supporting as you know he has other priorities as well I don't think it matters so that I don't think the rules have to be that subtle the rules are you want to create a structure where elected officials are not wholly dependent on a given donor or not largely dependent on a given donor one of the principles I always use is you want them to be in a situation where if they're in office and that donor comes back and says I really want XYZ the elected official can say as Senator McCain famously did get out of my office and if you can't say get out of my office because that money is actually very fundamentally important to your campaign you have a problem and that's the case for rules so there I would make the Republican plea for judicial modesty and say look this is complicated the discussion we've had indicates there's not a simple open and shut answer under our system of government the tie ought to go to Congress in those circumstances they're the ones who have been elected by the people spent all this time on it and came up with what they thought was a law that would prevent corruption and then you have five justices saying no we actually we have a better way to do this it seems to me that when you are in the middle of an area as murky as this that it is appropriate for the courts to defer to Congress on the theory that they as I think Justice O'Connor knew when she was still on the court is the only justice who had ever been elected to anything or raised money in a campaign that the members of the legislature the members of the court are going to have a better sense of what the dangers are here of corruption and how to avoid them. Michael maybe you could talk a little bit about where you see Congress going on this issue I mean this is certainly something that Congress is not going to let lie in its status quo forever and you also mentioned in your remarks that there's sort of always been this money it flows through the cracks it moves in mysterious ways what's next on the national level legislative? Mark's point was right that right now it's not a bipartisan issue at all it's a partisan issue in Congress and so in the near term I don't imagine much will happen. That said there are sort of fundamental forces in the electorate that would allow that to shift I mean one of the things we've had since the economic collapse is an economic populism on both sides of the ideological spectrum against the idea that banks always are getting favorable deals that the wealthy are treated on a different with a different set of rules than Main Street the sort of Wall Street Main Street thing appeals almost equally to activists in the Tea Party and on the left although they come to very different conclusions about what to do about it. It seems to me just from that not talking about the leadership currently in Congress who's resistant to this argues sort of obviously that you want more disclosure if that's your concern as a first step short of a constitutional amendment or getting new Supreme Court justices to overturn since the United, we do have an enormous problem now not only in the timing of disclosures often money will be spent we won't know who spent the money on election until after the votes are cast we have all this dark money in 501c4s that are going for political ads that we really have no access to who the donors are. You know Mitt Romney has said in one of the Republican debates that he would be for I mean in his ideal future system the super PACs would merge with his campaign anybody could give him unlimited amounts of money but there would be immediate disclosure of the money so the people would know and then be able to judge and track any concerns about corruption or the appearance of corruption. My guess is that's sort of next place to go to and in this age the FEC is a particularly dysfunctional body Trevor I can tell you more than me but there is really no good enforcement mechanism we have we've had for a while for most of these things in any real time and also the disclosure mechanisms that though they're improving somewhat remain far behind what is possible today I mean it should be the case that as soon as you as soon as they're cashing the check there's no reason that that money can't show up in a database that is posted online from any group that's spending money and influence elections so that would be my guess of where you go next I think the other political thing that will happen here is that whatever the outcome of the election Democrats intend to make this a populist appeal they intend to use and this is part of the democratic narrative for years that I'm with the working guy against the fat cats and we're gonna help the working guy defeat the fat cats I think Obama signaling in that interview it was an interview on Reddit that he would pursue a constitutional amendment basically what he's saying there is not that I'm gonna get a constitutional amendment pass cause it's not gonna happen anytime soon he's saying that I'm gonna go door to door on this and I'm gonna make this a rallying cry across the country as a way of organizing support for my side and some polls suggest there's real you could win people over by that you say look these guys are getting taken care of because I mean it used to be this election's a little different but it used to be just in the last few cycles that that was a bipartisan rallying cry I'm with the common man Republicans would say it too John McCain ran on it to a large extent in 2008 I'm against the powers that be in Washington I'm against the special interests in Washington so there's real potential I think for one party to really take this as a baton and use it as a way of mobilizing people if I can just add to that I mean I think at the same time that the bipartisan ground has disappeared it has become a much bigger issue among Democrats and not only on the ground but I mean it's really worth noting I mean at the time of McCain Feingold well Senator Feingold was a little bit Senator Feingold was sort of a pest in some ways to the Democratic leadership of the Senate and you know there was a little bit it was in many ways that was a miracle that legislation was quite a political miracle but what you have now in the previous Congress when Democrats controlled Congress until 2010 you did have a majority of Democrats supporting the Fair Elections Now Act and the leadership on that was coming from people like John Larson of Connecticut who is the third ranking Democrat I mean it's deeply embedded at the highest levels in a way that in my experience I haven't really seen that before it's been a more of a specialized interest sometimes at the legislative level so I think you know if you if Democrats were to take back the House you know potentially you'd have a very different political configuration which Republicans would then have to respond to because I think they really care I mean in the past I think leaders would sometimes say on the one hand yeah it was good to say they were for a campaign finance reform on the other hand like all incumbents they know one way or another I've mastered this system and I don't really want to mess with it so they were always halfway there I think the commitment is much stronger I also think it's going to be fascinating as you see people come into Congress who've had experience with state level systems like Arizona or Maine's or New York's that have worked well for them state level public financing systems I think you'll begin to see that just as for example people who've had experience with the New York City public financing system moving into the New York state legislature has created a really significant momentum for a similar reform in that legislature and the other interesting question is does the push for a constitutional amendment help build this you know or does it get in I think it gets in the way because I think it's one of those things where there's no steps along the way you're basically telling people you can't do anything until you have a constitutional amendment it's not like for example you had the equal rights amendment the equal rights amendment failed but there were lots of steps along the way that people could do so it didn't need to pass in order for a lot of good things to happen I think this one is just very different if you go back and look at the Congress 10 years ago when McCain-Fyingold was passed it's a very different Congress I mean there is a great deal of commentary about the fact that Congress has become more polarized and more centered on the left and right ends of the spectrum with much less in the middle in the early 2000s John McCain carried 20% of the Republican Senate caucus with him for McCain-Fyingold it passed in the House because a group of moderate Republicans voted for it against the wishes of their party leadership most of those senators who voted for McCain-Fyingold on the Republican side are gone the party has moved on it's evolved it has if you look at the leadership you go back to the 90s when I'd by the way forgotten about Goldwater Boran but there were perennially discussions about changing campaign finance and they took place in a world where someone like Bob Dole was the Republican leader and he was interested in making sure either that Republicans got a good deal or at least they didn't get a bad deal but he was not opposed to the notion of campaign finance reform or legislation in today's world with Mitch McConnell as the Senate leader he has spent years opposing legislation in this area and seeking to shut down the regulation we have it is at least partially because of Senator maybe largely because of Senator McConnell that we have an FEC that is deadlock three three and unable to take any action because it takes four votes and that's a talk about a super majority requirement that's a two thirds requirement for the FEC to do anything so we shouldn't be surprised that they don't but having said that and I think there really is a change in the way Congress looks at this on partisan lines I still hold out hope that after the election in a new Congress they will at least take a look at the disclosure side because there the Supreme Court was crystal clear in Citizens United eight to one the one part the minority joined in saying that disclosure of all of this spending for issue ads as well as election ads or campaign ads candidate ads was constitutional and they went further and they said it's a good thing it's of course necessary in a democracy citizens should know who's paying for these ads shareholders should know what their corporations are up to so that they can judge them and that's what we don't have particularly when you get to the ads paid for by these non-profits where there's simply no disclosure of who the donors are so it seems to me that that's an area where not only have Republicans traditionally favored it not only is it hard to argue against disclosure not only has the Supreme Court said it's a good thing and constitutional but you're going to have a Congress that has just gone through an election with a lot of undisclosed money and so that may be a situation where the ideology is trumped by the practical reality and candidates end up saying we ought to know where this is coming from so just very briefly and then I'll definitely get back to you but I think it's sort of easy to agree about the importance of disclosure and I think that's why you're right to sort of look into the future and say that might be where this debate is headed in general but there's some value to anonymous political speech certainly and is the goal to get to a place where all speech regarding an election all speech the 90 days before the election whatever it is however we set up the rules where we really know where every dollar of funding for every word that's spoken about the election comes from and if we're going to make exceptions who gets those exceptions and why and I think traditionally God knows as a member of the media I'm always very happy to get special treatment of all kinds in all places but this has been a place where we've made an exception basically just by saying we declare it thus that large corporations that produce newspapers, magazines whatever it is they can say whatever they want whatever they want because the free press is important but if we're talking about a world where disclosure really is so complete where is the space for anonymous political speech where is the space for unpopular political speech you know maybe the appropriate entity for that is an incorporation but you know the Citizens United case was about this wacky video made by this wacky group that was really a pretty independent collection of people who just wanted to get their ideas out there so what do we do with that and I guess I'm interested we'll get back to you but I think you were gonna kind of chime in and I suspect it segues here so go ahead I was just gonna say on the formal point that the best thing for getting more action on this is a scandal I mean Watergate gave us the regulatory framework we have the scandals, the foreign money scandals the top money scandals in the 90s that Watergate gave us, McCain-Feingold there's a lag here I fully expect that assuming this regime continues at some point scandals come up that raise the attention of the cost of this I think it's a good question you ask I'm in a difficult position I'm a journalist right so I'm biased towards more information I understand that there is a theoretical value to the ability to have anonymous speech in a presidential contest I guess I would just wanna weigh that value against the risk of corruption and my professional bias would suggest to me that the value of being anonymously able to say this guy is rotten to the core in millions of dollars in television ads and never disclose who I am is almost always gonna be outweighed by the value to the country of knowing who that person speaking is and why they're saying it but I agree that it's not a there's no clear cut answer for that I don't I guess understand why you think there's a value in someone being able to spend millions of dollars anonymously to run an ad saying someone is great or terrible I understand the value of the ad in that speech I understand the value of disclosure which is to prevent corruption and so that voters can put it in context but it wasn't clear to me what the value was of saying it's a good thing for democracy to be able to do that anonymously among other things just an unpopular view which we have many many reasons to want all kinds of unpopular views to be expressed in the political debate especially around elections and I might be a rich guy who just doesn't wanna have the pain at cocktail parties of it or I might be someone who genuinely fears for my personal safety or I might be someone who doesn't want my own reputation to sully the message that I'm conveying I think there are plenty of good reasons that most people can understand anyone who's ever written anything under a pseudonym there are lots of reasons why you might wanna communicate without adding your own identity to that message but there are reasons I'm not sure they're good reasons I think some of them are good reasons well as Justice Scalia said about the cocktail party example more or less that does not resemble the land of the brave I you clearly haven't been to the same cocktail parties we are now gonna open it up for questions we've got a few minutes to take some inquiries from the audience so who wants to get alienated at cocktail parties how about in the red jacket over here Hi thanks for having the forum I'm Eliza Newland Carney from Roll Call can you talk a little bit about the implications of the super pack and also the nonprofit phenomenon for the down ballot races the house and senate races the even state legislative races my vote is that the high water of the super pack in the presidential level was as said earlier in the primaries the high water mark for the super pack in the general election is going to be at the house and senate level and the simple reason is that you're looking at the numbers we saw up there you're talking about literally billions of dollars being spent in the presidential and a super pack can make a difference but it is not going to be the dominant speaker in a certainly in a house race in a senate race a super pack can and we're seeing evidence that they're coming in and spending tens of millions of dollars that may be more than the candidates themselves spent so they can be the dominant speaker in those races and I think that's a place where you see a greater evidence of the danger of corruption because a outside group can come in and knock someone off because they have publicly declared them to be an enemy of their viewpoint their economic agenda and then you go back to the next congress and you say look what happened to so-and-so and we've seen that in both parties primaries already where there were super packs that spent enormously in the Luger race for instance and on the democratic side in the congressional race in Pennsylvania and so after an election those packs then have a great deal of credibility and saying if you don't want that to happen to you you had better toe the line and I think because of the dominant position they can have in those races it makes them more important there. The other thing I would say and I don't know the answer to this but it's something to look at there is a sort of accountability mechanism in politics from using falsehoods or making stuff up in ads or being unnecessarily mean in your ads because if it's coming from the candidate there's a reputational cost of doing something wrong or saying something that's untrue against your opponent. Kathleen Hall-Jamison at Annenberg has done a study looking at presidential super packs and the ads they've run in this cycle and her conclusion is that the super pack ads are less truthful by and large on average and she has numbers of something like 30 a third of their ads include factual inaccuracies. The most famous of this is the ad that ran heavily in South Carolina and some other states against Newt Gingrich saying that he had basically supported funding for abortion in China which just wasn't true. Mitt Romney was able to stand on stage and say I have no idea why that ad's running I don't know anything about that ad there was no reputational cost to him even though it was being put up by restore our future. I wonder not just the presidential but on some of these down ballad races you have the real potential to move local elections or smaller elections with false information like that because it's coming from super packs less accountability because it's people for a better tomorrow it's not my opponent who's saying it you can't blame it directly on the opponent there's one step removed and I wonder if at the end of this race when we look back at the ads that were run in the final few weeks if we don't see some pretty slimy ads coming out of these outside groups. But two small things to add to that one is that TV stations actually can refuse ads that they consider libelous if they're coming from an outside group they can't refuse ads from candidates and they almost never do although there have been a few instances in this cycle of them doing it and potentially those groups can be sued for libel in a way that candidates can't be which is another point that Kathleen and all James are making if they're not at right I mean that's the other thing they disappear you know they form and disappear although again the libel barrier for a public campaign and a public official I mean you can go pretty far and distorting someone's record or the facts about them without meeting libel as a public should be we should have a libel implicit in this conversation though is something worth making explicit and that is that we're used to races where candidates are broadcasting at each other when I was involved in the McCain campaign last time there was a lot of press attention to how negative John McCain was being so we did a survey of all of our ads and said that only 50% of them or less were negative but people were hearing those and that's the image they got we then said well the Obama people were more negative than McCain it's true he was running more negative ads because he had so much more money he could run the negative ads and still run a bunch of positive ads but that's been what we're used to the idea that there's gonna be a mix of positive and negative and that candidates genuinely worry that they're going to be seen as being too negative and so they have reputational risk and election risk at stake in their ads the super PAC ads don't have the same risk we don't know who these people are we don't much care what we think of them and they are 99.9% negative it is not a 50-50 mix what we hear out of the super PACs because those are the ads that move voters or turn off voters or suppress turnout are almost 100% negative ads and that I think is something that after the election we need to think about as an effect of this new campaign finance world is that the message the American people are getting full throated is both of these people are awful and it's actually another argument I would have against the interest of anonymity in public speech even though I agree there's an interest it seems to me relatively small in comparison with the other interests at play if you allow one person to anonymously sully the debate in a significant way there's a cost for that although surely these reputational mechanisms while they're not as sharp with the super PACs do still stand that is if there is a widespread perception that Romney does have at least some control or influence over what super PAC ads on his behalf contain he'll be expected to stand up on the debate stage and repudiate the worst of it that having several times in the primaries and Romney stood on the debate stage and said I haven't seen those ads I wasn't involved in making them I don't know anything about them gosh gee you know and he but the fact that he was asked the question it all means that this is not something that the candidates are just gonna be able to say lullala I don't know anything about this that's right and there are more cases this is as you say in evolving and there are also clear cases where candidates have come out against ads done by super PACs on their behalf and then the super PAC pulls the ad and that happened also in the primaries so there is a burden I agree with you there is a burden on the candidate to publicly disavow things that are slimy and false and said in their support because they can they do have a direct effect I agree with that not to get us off on a tangent but I always like when people worry about whether campaigns are getting more negative I always like to cite the the accusation against Jefferson which was made that he was a hideous hermaphroditical character possessing neither the strength of a man nor the gentleness of a woman and this was something that was made in an official opposition newspaper at the time so this is not to say that it would be nice if our campaigns were nice but that pretty hideous smears have always been part of the political landscape and yet our democracy has survived that's absolutely true and so the partisans who bought those newspapers knew they were buying the republican or the federalist paper although they may not have known who was paying for them that's correct they only knew the paper existed in its corporate form and its name but they knew it was a party partisan one way or the other what's different I think is today a paper that you can read if you choose it takes a relatively small piece of your day to read you look at the advertising that's out there particularly in the swing states and it's becoming increasingly the only advertising on TV so that I think it's much more intensive and invasive and if it is entirely negative I'm not saying that the speech is more negative than before I'm saying there's just a lot more of it and you look at a democracy and say post election when one of these people is going to be the winner there's a ton of speech out there I mean the kind of thing you're talking about there's tons of stuff on Daily Coast and there's tons of stuff on red state and all kinds of stuff gets said and it's not going to be regulated and plenty of it is anonymous we're really talking about a very specific thing where people are putting money into organizations to influence the election to typically although I think there may be some shift on this typically by broadcast advertising to get to people who aren't or seeking out red state or other venues let's go beardy there were two of them oh there's a couple beardies back there sorry, beardy, number two Nathan Kaufman I'm a GW law student a group that hasn't been discussed in this conversation is political professionals campaign operatives who benefit enormously from this influx of outside money to what extent is there benefiting from this money present a hurdle to either a constitutional amendment or some kind of movement to bring more transparency or what have you to the system we have the committee for responsible hacks we'll start running ads save our industry I think these guys are making money on the net they're making money on the amount of money that goes into the the political space so I don't think it's the case that they all several of the senior Romney strategists would much rather have control of this money and the super PACs not have control of this money if they could other strategists have different interests I don't think they as a group have much lobbying power in Washington to influence or prevent the bigger issue is the politicians themselves who feel it would be against their interest to restrict super PACs to allow outside money to come in and maybe unseat them but I don't I've always been interested in whether in effect it's the consultants who push campaigns to say you need to be spending this many gazillions on TVI which is where they're the guys who buy horse farms in Virginia they're not opposition researchers they're always the media buyers who get their cut and some campaigns have begun a campaign notably I think really cracked down on some of the take they were getting but in a sense if that weren't so lucrative maybe campaigns would allocate their spending a little differently and there might be more going to grassroots or other things like that there's just a world of difference between working for a campaign with a budget that has trouble raising money with a cantankerous candidate who cares how it's spent or wants to know why that costs so much versus working versus working for yourself to go out and find people who will hand you money and you can pay yourself what you want, take the commissions you want run the ads you want and you don't really report to anybody it's a great world these super packs I think the ones with the highest restore a future and Marine Crossroads are run by very reputable professionals and they're collecting those large checks based on those reputations they're a place where these very wealthy people can go and feel comfortable that their million dollars will be spent well and not blown on boat trips gold plated party establishments they're the shadow party committees and that's why they can raise the money hi Dave Price I'm just a retiree who has plenty of time to come to these things and I really enjoy it so first I did want to commend the panel I think you did something very difficult you did take a murky topic and make it a little bit clearer so my first question I just have two very brief first one is to Trevor we've talked about corruption do you have any belief that he might take some of that super pack money and try to influence the Emmy so he finally wins from John Stewart after ten years of losing you're not worried about that but here's my question obviously it's going to be difficult to change this is a time when things are so polarized but with the new technology in the net and all those kinds of things out of there where everybody has kind of their access they say that you haven't really addressed that as kind of a weighting factor an offsetting factor it certainly doesn't equal the money we know that but if I go home tonight I can do whatever I want to as many people as I can reach so that's kind of different again going all the way back and I love your quote from Jeffers and I use that too it does make it different okay somebody had to Ben Franklin or somebody had to set that into print and now all you need to do is push a few buttons and you really do have this unlimited almost speech that can reach as many people to read it so how does that fit in against Citizens United I think the small dollar story first of all is a technology story Obama can't raise that money without technology and this is all new the net is a little different than a newspaper right but a newspaper is true you can go write a blog post say whatever you want and then an infinite number of people could read that blog post the thing is no one will know that you wrote that blog post and no one will come to your blog post unless you put money behind it or have a way of promoting it so there's still similar barriers I'm lucky if you do a viral thing it can take off but it's not exactly the same you can't just say your printing press is now as valuable as restore our futures printing press because you have access to word press or something like that it's a little more complicated I think the question surprised me I thought you were going to say we took a murky topic and made it murkier no you didn't the thing about that the blog post is who's not going to read it is that swing voter who's not paying any attention to politics and that's really what matters there but the small donor story is fascinating because what the small donor story does small donor technology does is it makes it possible we've all gotten so many emails asking for $3 nobody ever in 1994 asked for $3 because there's no point in asking for $3 because it costs just as much it might be good to know that you had a supporter it costs just as much to go back to them so they only asked you for if you got one of those direct mail things it would like suggested 75 or 150 or something like that the value of being able to ask for $3 and then you can go again and again all you need is the email you get people to sort of what they can actually give you're sort of pricing them if what I can give is 150 I'll get there or whatever it's brilliant and it really has had a real transformational power and making it worthwhile for candidates to seek small donors and that's why I think you know solutions that are based on encouraging small donors are really the future in a way that they couldn't have been in 1994 can you just sort of tell the story for me of why these small donors are ultimately good that is to say you know if we have you know 100 $3 donors versus one $300 donor how is that better for democracy? well it represents a broader base of support a broader range of interest people were voting for Obama anyway this is not changing people's votes an answer to that is that candidates and campaigns love to have small donors because if they actually invested their money even if it's $3 they're much more likely to vote they're much more likely to talk to their neighbors about it they have made their investment so and then the campaign has their emails and it can urge them to get their neighbors to vote and it can ask them to volunteer so I think the answer is both for the campaign and democracy John McCain used to go on and on about this talking about McCain Fine Gold he said the problem is we've ended up with these millions of dollars of ads being spent in Arizona and nothing else to come to the barbecues and knock on doors and drive people to polls and be the volunteers that's what we want and I think he's right that is what you want in a democracy is an engaged electorate and so getting them to donate is not only part of that but then leads to these other things what you don't want is a bunch of people who are just sort of dazed by the air wars and stagger off to the polling booth if they haven't been sufficiently disillusioned can I use another can I use just one more question and Speedy number two has been so patient I just wanted to ask a question about the difficulty of reporting on a system that has become so much more complicated in the last eight years but especially in the last two years with so many different players and so many different rules and different agencies I mean we see everyday 501C4s that are called super packs that's the basic level but even talking about spending by a 501C4 as opposed to a super pack and things like that I've talked to many journalists and go into a five minute explanation and they say well how do you say that in 30 seconds so I want to ask particularly Mr. Sher about how would you rate the media's reporting of this in general how could it be improved or is it bound to always be lost in the murkiness of the subject one of the best things about super packs is they have a name that sounds kind of super cool super packs and when you say 501C4 it's like you've already lost your audience and individual super packs always have hilarious yeah they always have but and you know it's funny like the media kind of adopts these handles to try and make this very complicated explainable to the public we sort of shorthand super pack is what we use this year before we like stealth stealth packs in 2004 I think the 527s were called stealth packs it sounded really cool too or dark money you know people will talk about it sounds really cool but I agree with you it's a huge problem I think you would agree that the agencies don't have their act together given what we have in terms of what technology can do if the FEC was a functioning body and worked better with the IRS and congress weighed in here and created some sane system of simple disclosure that can be easily presented right now I depend heavily on open secrets I have for years to basically process a lot of this data so I don't have to spend a lot of time waiting through disclosure reports and so the answer is we need groups like yours to do a lot of this the sort of the work in between and there are a couple other groups to do it as well and we just have to keep trying the bigger problem in the media is when we don't distinguish between the two we don't try and explain it's not when we explain and people tune out because that happens also but the bigger problem is if you don't make clear there are totally different rules for different sets the rules are very complicated and some groups are disclosing that's the big difference they're donors and we know who they are and in some groups there's just this pot of several million dollars we have no idea where it came from if I can just say as somebody who's primarily an observer a reader of the journalism about money and politics I think it's been extraordinary in this cycle it's actually been really impressive what Michael's been doing what Michael's successor at Mother Jones Andy Kroll has been doing has been very good Nick Confessori in The Times has been doing amazing coverage but the 501c4 story it's kind of unprecedented and this is not I've worked for a lot of non-profits so I've worked for a foundation 501c4s are supposed to be their non-profits and they're supposed to allow some lobbying they allow a little bit they're really not intended to be used as political vehicles that's not supposed to be their primary purpose and no agency is prepared you know the IRS is not prepared to suddenly deal with this thing that's in their non-profit zone which is not really what they're supposed to be dealing with that's the biggest thing that happened it's not you know it's just a direct violation of what the intent of the tax not the campaign finance law but the tax law of what 501c4s are supposed to be I think it really is complicated I had a reporter interview me and I started talking about 501c4s he stopped me he said excuse me but my personal goal is never to mention the phrase 501c4 in my article that's why Stephen Colbert was so good he could actually manage to distill all this in the you know the four minutes and try to explain why you should care get Stephen Colbert to come up with a new name for 501c4 we could all start using it we can end on a point of bipartisan agreement Stephen Colbert is awesome thank you for coming and come up and ask your follow-up questions later on