Do You See What I See?
RingAdams, James
h0 YOU SEE WHAT I SEE? by James Ring Adams he Indomoney scandal is showing the jewel of the post-Watergate political clean-up—campaign finance reform—to be a complete and utter failure. A law...
...Take the Cabrera story, still only half-told...
...Florida Republicans found a juicy issue in the DNC largesse of drug-runner Jorge Cabrera...
...During pre-trial maneuvering, a Miami Herald 28 February 1997 The American Spectator...
...Acting on a tip, Drug Enforcement Administration agents had staked out the warehouse and found nearly 6,000 pounds of cocaine...
...But there should have been ten such uproars throughout the whole campaign, not just a last month tit-for-tat...
...Several last-minute uproars showed the JAMES RING ADAMS is an investigative writer for The American Spectator...
...Times reporters tried to locate Cheong Am America, a South Korean company that had given a quarter of a million dollars to the DNC, and found that it didn't exist: not in the United States, and not in Korea...
...Perhaps the most shameful aspect of the (still-growing) scandal over Lippo, the Bamboo Network, and Democratic National Committee ex-fundraiser John Huang is that the ruckus came so late in the game...
...Aside from a few general profiles of "special interests," however, the press this year shirked the fundamental spade work of reporting who gave what to whom, and what the donors might have wanted in return...
...The agents also searched Cabrera's black leather briefcase and found a color photo of the businessman posing with Cuba's Maximum Leader Fidel Castro...
...kind of story that lurks in these reports...
...A law designed to eliminate "fat-cat" influence on politicians by restricting individual campaign donations to $1,000 allows corporations, unions, and Indonesian gardeners to buy influence with six-figure doses of "soft money...
...That investigation fed off a Common Cause report on soft money donations that came out in late August...
...Many of the best stories, in fact, merely reported the valuable work of non-profit groups like the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Responsive Government, and Common Cause, which do know how to use these documents...
...The files of the Federal Election Commission may be the best window yet opened into the structure of American politics...
...One of the amazing features of the 1996 campaign is that this rich vein of information was so under-used...
...The FEC starts to receive presidential campaign finance reports well before the first primaries...
...Even the most shameless recipients agree the system should be changed...
...Jorge Luis Cabrera, a 4o-year-old Cuban-American fish wholesaler, was arrested in January 1996 after meeting with smugglers from the Colombian Cali cartel at a cigar warehouse in Kendall, Florida...
...Although cumbersome and easily improved, these lists of donors and expenditures speak volumes about a candidate's network of friends and political creditors...
...The Clinton camp tried to generate a counter-fire over Dole's support from the scandal-pocked Fanjul family of Miami...
...The first major story on Huang's presidential fundraising came before that— in the Los Angeles Times on September 21...
...Yet amidst the political butt-covering and the earnest reform essays and above all the hand-wringing of the press, the one feature of current law that actually does its job has been virtually ignored: the campaign disclosure report...
...The press feeding frenzy started in early October (give William Safire's October 7 column in the New York Times the credit...
...But political reporters could have made the connection any time they wanted to look through the FEC reports...
Vol. 30 • February 1997 • No. 2
