Money finds a way

Because, remember: campaign finance law will make politics more transparent, more accountable, and less costly.

Riiiiight.

Led by veterans of presidential and congressional campaigns, a coalition of Democratic Party interest groups, armed with millions of dollars in soft money, is rapidly constructing an unprecedented political operation designed to supplement the activities of Sen. John F. Kerry’s campaign in the effort to defeat President Bush.
The newest visible sign of the coalition’s activities will be seen beginning today, when a $5 million advertising campaign begins in 17 battleground states. But behind the scenes, Democratic operatives are moving to set up coordinated national and state-by-state operations that amount to the equivalent of a full presidential campaign, minus the candidate.
[…] This parallel Democratic campaign, already under legal challenge, grows out of changes in campaign finance laws. Those changes prohibit the national party committees from raising and spending soft money — large, unregulated contributions — on behalf of their presidential candidates. The Democrats have taken the expertise they developed in past campaigns and applied it to the new, separate operation. By law, coalition members cannot coordinate with the campaign of Kerry (Mass.), the presumptive Democratic candidate.
[…] Most of these new organizations have been established as “527s,” shorthand for the provision of the tax law that covers their activities. The 527s are controversial because they accept soft money from corporations and unions, which critics say represents an evasion of the ban on large, unregulated contributions in the new campaign finance law known as the McCain-Feingold Act, and because they operate under less stringent disclosure regulations.

Not that this is a Democrat issue alone. Plenty of similar stuff is going on with the GOP.

By forcing the money out of the party and formal campaigns, we end up with all these peripheral organizations, technically not allowed to “consult” with the campaign, but able to route relatively unrestricted funding where they want, with far less visibility or accountability (since the candidate can claim no knowledge of what they’re doing).

I understand full well the desire to lesson the money spent on political campaigns, and I think the desire is laudable. But it’s like trying to legislate morality — folks who want to throw dollars into the equation will always find a place to throw them, and folks who want dollars thrown their direction will always find ways to catch them. The more baroque of a setup campaign finance laws produce, the more byzantine the ways people will find to circumvent them.

UPDATE: Reading further into the article, I find that it’s the Dems that have latched onto the 527 stuff, largely because of the larger GOP war chest. The GOP has filed suit with the FEC about this tactic, but has said that if they lose, they’ll do just the same thing. Regardless, it’s clear to me that, for all that McCain-Feingold was supposed to regulate this sort of thing, it’s already failing tha laugh test.