August 5, 2004
Most people who are desperate to see Bush out of the White House don't want to hear a word of complaint about anything that may help in that cause.
Forgive me if I break the code of silence.
Kerry supporters are making a mockery of McCain/Feingold.
That campaign finance law banned soft money, the unlimited donations to political parties.
But the Democrats (and the Republicans, for that matter) have found a way around this by funneling soft money not to the parties but to so-called 527 groups that are nominally independent of the parties and the candidates. George Soros has been tossing million dollar coins to these groups, and if Republican financiers were leading the way in this new Olympic event, progressives would be shrieking from the sidelines.
On top of that, there is supposed to be no coordination between these groups and the party or the candidate they favor.
But as The New York Times has reported, it sure looks like there's coordination going on. At the Democratic Convention, bagmen for the 527s intermingled with Kerry delegates and campaign strategists, virtually making a blur of their separate roles, as Jim Rutenberg and Glen Justice reported in the Times on July 29. Officials for the 527s said that while they were in contact with people from the party and from the candidate's campaign, that doesn't mean they were coordinating activities.
But the suspicion lingers. Just as Kerry stopped advertising in August, these groups revved up their own advertising. And, according to Rutenberg's account in the Times of August 5, they are using virtually the same script as the Kerry campaign, emphasizing some of the very words that Kerry uses in his own ads.
This does not pass the smell test.
No wonder Kerry didn't mention campaign finance reform at his speech at the convention.