Show me the money

You don’t get to be a billionaire without making some pretty influential contacts along the way. Now, new details have been released by the Federal Election Commission, showing the financial juggernaut which is powering the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. For the first time, it has been revealed who donates to the Super PACs: the groups working in support of a candidate which are allowed to raise – and spend – as much as they like.

And predictably enough, the most generous donors behind the pro Romney Restore Our Future are two hedge fund bosses, the head of a firm which controversially buys up sovereign debt from developing countries, and one of the Koch brothers, well known for funding conservative causes. Other big givers include several of Romney’s former Bain Capital colleagues, and a bunch of Goldman Sachs executives. Not much there to dispell Romney’s image as an impossibly wealthy creature of Wall Street – and perhaps not such a good moment for him to tell CNN “I’m not concerned about the very poor”.

Super rich

No matter that Romney tried to clarify things: “we will hear from the Democratic party the plight of the poor…my focus is on middle income Americans”, he ploughed on, hardly helping matters. Team Obama didn’t waste much time picking up on the remark, with this tweet from campaign manager Jim Messina: “So much for ‘we’re all in this together’…” You’d think he would have learned from his unfortunate “I like firing people” comment in an interview last year.

I’m not concerned about the very poor… Mitt Romney, on CNN

But whatever its provenance, the super PAC superbucks funded a massive $17 million advertising blitz for Romney, battering Newt Gingrich into submission in last night’s Florida primary. As we’ve noted before, the overwhelming majority of that advertising was profoundly negative: just one could be construed as positive, and that one was in Spanish.

Mind the gap

As for Gingrich, his super PAC, Winning Our Future, managed to raise $10 million in January, which sounds impressive, but it was all from a single donor – Las Vegas casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson. Indeed, without his vast contribution, the former Speaker might well have proved unable to sustain his campaign thus far.

These new disclosures reveal the sharp gulf in fundraising clout between the GOP and the Democrats. They’ve proved rather slow off the mark when it comes to Super PACs, with four pro-Obama groups mustering a total of just $19 million – less than half the amount raised by the two Crossroads groups, run by President Bush’s former chief of staff Karl Rove. Although President Obama has banked an impressive $130 million for the year, mostly from small donors, that’s not a great deal more than all the Republican groups combined. And it’s nowhere near the $1 billion warchest his campaign once boasted of.

All the President’s Friends

Unlike any of the Republican field, President Obama has revealed some 90 people tasked with raising money for his campaign from well-connected friends and business colleagues, known as bundlers. Among them, the American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, whose glitzy house parties and fashion extravaganzas have helped to pull in half a million dollars. Also on the list, the Hollywood powerhouses Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

But although money can buy you many things, including more paid-advertising than there are slots on the airwaves, it can’t guarantee you votes. Just ask Mitt Romney, who spent some $35 million on his failed election bid in 2008 – three times the amount spent by John McCain, who did snare the nomination. In Florida, of course, Romney did prevail. But it cost him: almost twenty dollars a vote, according to Politico – while Gingrich and his supporters spent just over six dollars on each vote they secured. Of course they weren’t exactly handing out wodges of notes outside polling stations.

Adds up

But in a Presidential campaign where experts estimate a whopping $3 billion is likely to be spent on a cacophony of advertising, pity the poor voters in battleground states across the country, as they collectively dive for the mute button. Welcome to the brave new world of high-finance-assisted democracy, and beware. In the words of Wordsworth’s sonnet: Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

Felicity Spector writes about US politics for Channel 4 News