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| Florida Sen. Mel Martinez, general chairman of the Republican National Committee, is facing fallout from a slew of irregularities related to his Senate campaign. In his squeaker 2004 race, Martinez accepted contributions over the legal limit and failed to properly disclose information about donations, according to an audit released last week by the Federal Election Commission. The audit is being used by Martinez's political opponents to question his leadership and could lead to a hefty fine. Mark Bubriski, a spokesman for the Florida State Democratic Party, called the violations "pretty big mistakes." "It seems like time and again, something is attributed to him that shouldn't have happened, and he blames his staff," Bubriski said, adding, "It really calls into question his leadership ability. What else is going to fall through the cracks?" But Martinez campaign spokesman Matthew Hunter predicted it won't hurt the senator's ability to raise funds for either his 2010 reelection effort or the RNC. "It's clear by the amount of funds that the RNC raised in the first quarter and the money that his campaign raised over the first quarter, and frankly over the last two years, that it will not have a negative effect on fundraising," Hunter said. Martinez's Senate committee raised $239,320 during the first three months of the year and finished the first quarter with $458,000 in the bank. The RNC, meanwhile, raised $24.6 million in the quarter, compared with $15 million raised during the same time by the Democratic National Committee. "He is a very effective representative of the Republican Party and will continue to be," Hunter said. FEC auditors found that Martinez's Senate campaign accepted contributions exceeding limits by a total of $313,235; failed to properly report funds raised by joint committees, as well as $162,014 raised in the days before the primary and general elections; and didn't do enough to collect information on donors' occupations and employers. Auditors noted the campaign committee has taken steps to rectify the violations. And Martinez issued a statement saying: "The campaign takes seriously the substance of the matter and made changes subsequent to that election to ensure full and timely compliance with all campaign finance laws in the future." The violations could result in a hefty fine if the FEC decides they're worthy of enforcement. The agency has grown aggressive of late. This month, it levied penalties of $120,000 on the committee for Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.), $105,000 on the Colorado Democratic Party and $110,000 apiece on the Republican Issues Committee and Planned Parenthood's political action committee. Martinez, who was a member of President Bush's Cabinet, was elected RNC general chairman earlier this year. Though Martinez is the public face of the RNC, his party job mainly entails traveling the country raising money, not running its day-to-day operations. Those duties fall to chairman Mike Duncan, a lawyer schooled in the arcane world of campaign finance. |
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
RNC Chairman accused of finance irregularities
FBI In Talks With GOP Rep Feeney In Abramoff Scandal
Early edition: Feeney's office said the congressman is cooperating voluntarily.
By ANITA KUMAR
Published April 23, 2007
WASHINGTON - The FBI has asked U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney for information about his dealings with Jack Abramoff as part of its ongoing investigation into the lobbyist convicted of defrauding clients.
FBI agent Kevin Luebke refused to say whether Feeney, a Republican from the Orlando area, is under federal investigation.
Federal agents also have asked the St. Petersburg Times for an email sent to the newspaper by Feeney's office describing a golfing trip the congressman took with Abramoff to Scotland in 2003.
Feeney did not return calls for comment Monday. But his Washington office released a statement to the Times late Monday.
"Rep. Feeney considers this an embarrassing episode in his 17-year career as an elected official and an expensive lesson for him as a public servant," according to the statement.
Feeney is one of three House members who accompanied Abramoff to Scotland on trips that included rounds of golf at the legendary Royal & Ancient Golf Club at St. Andrews.
The others are: former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, who is serving prison time for corruption, and former House Republican leader Tom DeLay, indicted in Texas for alleged improper fundraising, is under investigation.
"The Justice Department has been investigating activity surrounding Jack Abramoff," according to Feeney's statement. "The Justice Department has contacted Rep. Feeney to request more information regarding this matter and he is pleased to voluntarily cooperate."
The FBI contacted the Times last week to ask for the February 2006 email that Feeney's then chief of staff Jason Roe wrote to the newspaper in response to a series of questions about interactions between Feeney and Abramoff. The Times has referred the FBI's request to its attorney.
Roe, now deputy campaign manager for presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said Monday he has not been contacted by the FBI and has no knowledge of an investigation. But, he said, he was not surprised to hear federal agents are asking questions.
"I'm sure they're doing due diligence," he said. "I guess it would be my expectation they would look into everything" associated with Abramoff.
Feeney, 48, who spent a decade in the Florida Legislature where he was speaker of the House, has paid $23,000 in legal fees this year - more than any other expense - according to his latest campaign finance reports.
"Rep. Feeney anticipates voluntarily cooperating with the Justice Department in any further investigation of this trip and looks forward to promptly resolving this matter," according to Feeney's statement.
The U.S. House announced in January that Feeney violated its rules by apparently letting Abramoff pay for the trip to Scotland. Feeney agreed to pay the cost of the trip - $5,643 - to the U.S. Treasury.
Feeney said he thought a conservative think tank - the National Center for Public Policy Research - was paying for the trip. He said he learned later from newspaper reporters that Abramoff may have paid in violation of House rules that forbid members from taking free trips from lobbyists and asked the ethics committee to investigate.
"Any assertion that this office knew Abramoff paid for the Scotland trip is a g--d----- lie," Roe wrote in the email being sought by the FBI. The email was quoted in a newspaper article last year.
Records and media reports show lawmakers - including Ney and DeLay - have helped Abramoff with his lobbying.
Last week, Rep. John Doolittle, R--Calif., gave up his coveted seat on the House Appropriations Committee after the FBI raided his home.
In last year's email, Roe vehemently denied any improper relationship with Abramoff as a result of the trip.
"Tom has never written a letter for Abramoff. Abramoff has never been in our office. Abramoff has never asked anything of us," Roe wrote in the email. "There is no accusation of a quid pro quo. No quid pro quo exists."
Feeney received $4,000 from Abramoff and three of his clients but recently gave the $1,000 from Abramoff to charity. Money also went the other direction: Feeney paid the tab at Abramoff's Washington restaurant, Signatures, at least three times, twice when the costs were more than $2,000, according to Feeney's campaign finance reports.
Times researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report. Times staff writer Anita Kumar can be reached at akumar@sptimes.com or 202-463-0576.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Primary fears
By Walter Shapiro
Apr. 11, 2007 | The Republican stalwarts who will select their party's nominee continue to demand that the GOP presidential contenders support George W. Bush's surge strategy in Iraq. That was the consensus early last month among the top political advisors to John McCain, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani at an invitation-only conference I attended at the Kennedy School at Harvard, a transcript of which was made public this week.
"Speaking as sort of a student of public opinion on where are Republican voters on this, I think you do see them sort of standing tall and standing behind the president and supporting the surge," said Alex Gage, a Romney strategist. Giuliani's campaign manager Mike DuHaime said, "Just like the major candidates are all in similar positions on the war in Iraq, so are many Republican voters." Rick Davis, who was McCain's 2000 campaign manager and chairs his current effort, put it bluntly, "We are all pretty much in the same boat."
While none of the Republican strategists described it this way, the leading GOP contenders are torn between appealing to the party's pro-war base voters and courting disaster in November, or playing to a dovish general-election audience and risking losing the primaries. Ironically, this is what Republicans chortled over in 2004 when it appeared that the Democrats were poised to nominate antiwar crusader Howard Dean. Now it is turnabout time -- and the leading GOP candidates cannot dissent too audibly from Bush's war goals. "I've been in primaries where [the candidates] have looked ahead to the general election," said Bill McInturff, McCain's pollster. "They tended not to be very successful."
McInturff contended that "even the Republican electorate is dissatisfied with the conduct of the war, even if they agree with the policy." But even though the president's approval ratings have been consistently below 40 percent, woe to any Republican contender who criticizes Bush personally. "People in our party admire his consistency, his leadership and his personal dimensions," said McInturff. "And you had better be very, very careful about how you talk about the president around those things."
Sponsored by the Institute of Politics and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, the March 5 GOP seminar was designed to gauge whether top political operatives would speak with relative candor at the outset of the presidential race. (The results were mixed in this test of the bygone department-store cliché: Does Macy's tell Gimbel's?) A Democratic version featuring the Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards campaigns was held on March 19. Transcripts of both are available here. (Disclosure: I was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center in 2005.)
What was striking during the Democratic session was the shared confidence that the presidential field was set in concrete and that the nominee was represented in the room. Mark Alexander, a policy advisor to Obama, predicted, "I think the three of us will be diving for the tape." There was animated discussion of Al Gore's prospects for the Nobel Peace Prize, but scant concern that he would mount a second campaign for the White House.
In contrast, the GOP operatives were looking nervously over their shoulders in anticipation of a late entry into the demolition derby that is the Republican nomination fight. Mark McKinnon, who was Bush's media consultant and is currently a lecturer at the Shorenstein Center, predicted flatly, "There is a very good chance that Newt Gingrich will get into the race. I think he'll really stir it up. I think he'll change the dynamic considerably and I think he could even win a primary or two." McInturff expressed a similar theory about Gingrich: "I think he'll run his ... own style of campaign. It's going to be typically Newt. It will be a little different."
No one in either party expressed any confidence that their candidate had developed a strategy for competing on Feb. 5 when roughly half the voters in the nation will participate in more than 20 state primaries. Washington attorney Ben Ginsberg, who is advising Romney, noted pointedly, "There will be more states at play on Feb. 5 than there were target states in either [the] 2000 or 2004 [general elections]."
What this means in practice is that the early states -- Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina for both parties, plus Nevada for the Democrats -- are likely to serve as Nielsen test audiences for the entire nation. Nick Baldick, who ran Edwards' 2004 campaign and is advising him this cycle, said, "I think exponentially more important [are] not just Iowa, but all four of the now early states. Not even Senator Clinton can buy enough television on Feb. 5 if [she doesn't] win enough states of the first four."
The Kennedy School conferences reflected a bipartisan humility about the unpredictability of campaigns and the volatility of voter sentiments. Having been through wringer and spin cycle of presidential politics, these operatives all showed a hard-earned respect for the Law of Unanticipated Consequences. Mandy Grunwald, who was Bill Clinton's media advisor in 1992 and is playing the same role for Hillary this time, said, "It's part of the lovely fun of this democracy that you don't know what's going to happen, none of us do. We are all going to have near-death experiences. Great things are going to happen. Horrible things are going to happen. We can't tell what they will be."
Grunwald directed those comments at political reporters who exude a false sense of certainty in their coverage. But the same cautionary words can be applied to stay-at-home soothsayers who believe they have the foresight to divine the nominees in the most wide-open presidential cycle since 1952.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Friday, March 23, 2007
Republican Party loyalty in 'dramatic' decline
Republican Party loyalty in decline since 2002
The survey, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for People and the Press, found a "dramatic shift" in political party identification since 2002, when Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, half of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, while only 35% aligned with Republicans.
What's more, the survey found the public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats' values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has edged down.
Those findings suggest that Republicans' political challenges reach beyond the unpopularity of the war in Iraq and Bush.
"Iraq has played a large part; the pushback on the Republican Party has to do with Bush, but there are other things going on here that Republicans will have to contend with," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "There is a difference in the landscape."
A key question is whether those trends signal a broad and lasting change in the balance of power between the parties or just a mood swing that will soon pass or moderate. It remains to be seen whether Democrats can capitalize on Republicans' weakness and gain a durable position of political dominance.
"This is the beginning of a Democratic opportunity," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. "The question is whether we blow it or not."
Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, said he believed the Pew poll exaggerates his party's problems and that the situation will improve as attention shifts to choosing Bush's successor.
"Once we have new nominees to redefine the Republican and Democratic party in 2008, then we will have a far more level playing field than we have today," Ayres said.
But other Republicans believe such poll results signal a clear end to the era of GOP domination that began with President Reagan's election, continued when the party took control of Capitol Hill in 1994, and helped elect Bush twice to the White House.
"There are cycles in history where one party or one movement ascends for a while and then it sews the seeds of its own self-destruction," said Bruce Bartlett, a conservative analyst and author of a 2006 book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted American and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."
"It's clear we have come to an end of a Republican conservative era," he said.
The Pew poll measured the views of 2,007 adults from Dec. 12 through Jan. 9. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The study of long-term shifts in political attitudes and values is part of series of periodic reports dating back to 1987.
The gap between Republican and Democratic identification, which Pew measured by counting people who are leaning toward one party or the other as well as those with a firm allegiances, is the widest spread between the parties since Pew began since the studies.
Although the gap between Republican and Democratic allegiances speaks to the GOP's current troubles, Kohut said that the shift mostly reflects the defection of independents from the party rather than a more favorable overall assessment of the Democratic Party.
The proportion expressing a positive view of Democrats has declined since January 2001 by six points, to 54%. But the public's regard for Republicans cratered during the Bush years, as the proportion holding a favorable view of the GOP dropped 15 points to 41%.
Republicans seem to be paying a price for a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the country during the Bush years. Three out of 10 people said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the country--a 25-point drop in the last seven years.
While Republicans rode to political power calling for smaller government, support for government action to help the disadvantaged has risen since the GOP took control of Congress in 1994. Back then, 57% believed the government had a responsibility to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves; now 69% believe that.
On the other hand support for Bush's signature issue--a strong, proactive military posture--has waned since 2002, when 62% said that the best way to ensure peace is through military strength. Now, only 49% believe that.
On social issues, the survey found that support for some key conservative positions has edged down: The people who said they supported "old-fashioned values about family and marriage" dipped from 84% in 1994 to 76%.
Support for allowing school boards to have the right to fire homosexual teachers dropped from 39% in 1994 to 28% in 2007.
janet.hook @latimes.com