Few things exasperate me as much as the predilection of both Republicans and Democrats to make a mountain out of a molehill when they discover a technical, but otherwise unremarkable, violation of campaign finance laws.
Earlier this week, a mountain was manufactured by Democrat Kendall Van Dyk, a well regarded state representative from Billings. Van Dyk discovered to both his horror and glee that a fellow named David Fulwiler donated $100 to Roy Brown, the Billings state senator who is running for the Republican nomination for governor (see Charles Johnson’s story in the Missoulian). Fulwiler, you see, listed his name as David Berg, which is the on-the-air name he uses for his radio talk show, “Voices of Montana.” I cannot, incidentally, find a link to a useful official page for this program.
Donors must use their real names when making a political contribution, so Van Dyk filed a complaint with Montana’s commissioner of political practices. That initiated an investigation, which will end in a report, which when released will create the excuse for another story on the incident, thereby bringing the incident to the public’s attention a second time. On a tactical level, it’s a nice twofer
Fulwiler, I strongly suspect, may have a bit of trouble separating himself from his on-the-air persona, may actually think of himself as David Berg, and simply didn’t give a second thought to making the contribution as David Berg instead of David Fulwiler. Was it a technical violation of campaign finance law? Of course. Was it a transgression worthy of a public flogging and ten years on Devils Island? Of course not.
Van Dyk, or someone he designated, could have dropped the Brown campaign a note advising them that a technical violation might have occurred, and left it at that. But instead, he chose to play Partisan Gotcha.
Once the pot calls the kettle black, the kettle feels obliged to bestow reciprocal honors. You can be sure that Roy Brown’s operatives are submitting Brian Schweitzer’s campaign finance reports to a microscope and X-ray machine in hope of finding some kind of violation — and that when they hit paydirt, they’ll speed-dial every reporter in Montana.
And you can bet they’ll find a microscopic irregularity. I’ve been around political campaigns a long time. Small, isolated, issue irrelevant, technical violations — missing information, donations in excess of the legal limit, for example — are common to all campaigns. Campaigns make good faith efforts to catch these errors, correcting mistakes as they become aware of them. Check any major candidate’s official reports: you’ll find several donations that were returned because the donor inadvertently exceeded the limits. It’s no big deal, and usually it’s not even a small deal.
A pattern of errors suggesting fraud is something else, of course, but as long as mistakes seem innocent, as long as there are not so many mistakes that incompetence becomes an issue, the voters generally don’t give a damn. They know the difference between technical violations that will be corrected and contributions from an unsavory sources that should be returned. And they know that the politics of the donor, not whether he dotted every “i” and dotted every “t”, is what really counts.
Who donates to a campaign is newsworthy because it identifies the interests that a candidate will represent (with a few exceptions), and the policies the candidate is likely to pursue. Voters are interested in where candidates stand on important issues; health care, energy, education, to name a few.
But campaigns and the news media need reminding that voters throw up their hands in exasperation when campaigns and reporters instead focus on trivial campaign finance violations and other inside baseball gotchas.
In 2006, I stayed silent on this subject. This election year, I’m speaking up.