New Yorker: Jeb, Hillary, and the Money Primary

[99th_Monkey]

Jeb, Hillary, and the Money Primary
by John Cassidy * FEBRUARY 18, 2015 * The New Yorker

In today’s political news: Presidential candidates, money, Wall Street billionaires, and foreign governments. If you want to read an uplifting story about Jeffersonian democracy in action, this post isn’t for you. If you want to be reminded of how American politics actually works, keep reading.

First up: Jeb Bush. For a couple of months now, journalists have been going along with the fiction that he isn’t yet fully committed to the 2016 Presidential campaign, and is merely in the preparatory stage. In a lengthy story on Politico, Ben White and Marc Caputo reveal the truth: the Bush campaign is already in full flight, but for now it is concentrating on one-per-centers rather than on the electorate at large.

Last week, on his sixty-second birthday, Bush travelled to New York, where Henry Kravis, the private-equity tycoon, threw him a party-cum-fundraiser. Here’s a description of the event, from White and Caputo:

Bush celebrated in Kravis’ 26-room penthouse with more than 40 of the richest people in New York. Among them were Bush’s cousin, George Walker IV, the chief executive of the investment management firm of Neuberger Berman, and real estate mogul Jerry Speyer, along with Ken Mehlman and Alex Navab of Kravis’ firm, KKR. The admission price: a minimum of $100,000, also the going rate for other Bush fundraisers. Guests took an elevator straight to the foyer and noshed on salmon and other hors d’oeuvres while listening to Bush talk about strategy for the upcoming campaign.

Fund-raising isn’t an incidental part of Bush’s preparations; in fact, it appears to be the main reason he delayed a public announcement that he’s running. Since he’s still not officially a candidate, he isn’t bound by campaign-finance rules governing Presidential campaigns. This means that he can raise large sums of money with fewer restrictions. Speaking in Iowa last week, Joe Biden suggested that 2016 could be the first four-billion-dollar campaign—two billion for each candidate, versus the estimated $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion spent by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, respectively, in 2012. Biden might not be too far off the mark. In any case, Bush has cleverly structured things so that he can raise a boatload of money. Next week, he’s scheduled to attend another lavish fund-raiser, this one in Palm Beach, where he could raise five million dollars. Kenneth Gross, a former attorney for the Federal Election Commission, suggested to White and Caputo that Bush was creating a new template for Presidential campaigns: money first, politics later.

The other news of the day that’s attracting the attention of the political world also relates to fund-raising, and it involves the Clinton Foundation, which Bill Clinton set up in 2001 to promote anti-poverty programs and other philanthropic projects around the world. In today’s Wall Street Journal, James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus revealed that the New York-based charitable foundation has recently received a number of donations from overseas governments, including those of Germany, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Canada’s Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development Agency, which is responsible for promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/jeb-hillary-money-primary?intcid=mod-latest