The Nation's inside look at Bush's "Rangers, Pioneers & Mavericks"

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050207&s=sifry

Late last summer, I had an interesting conversation with Brad Freeman, a top California Republican who is today one of three co-chairs of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, overseeing the raising of a whopping $40 million in private contributions from top corporations and lobbyists for this week's events. Freeman, whose private investment company made him rich, is so close to the Bush family that when they moved into the White House in 2001, they gave him their pet cat, Ernie, because they feared his claws would tear up the rugs.

snip

Not only that, his schedule listed several events that had been left off the RNC's thirty-two-page master calendar, including a special reception at the Four Seasons with former President Bush for "Rangers, Pioneers & Mavericks" (fundraisers who respectively bundled $200,000, $100,000 or $50,000 in individual donations to the Bush campaign). A page of "miscellaneous information" included personal cell-phone numbers for Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, Benjamin Ginsberg (a top election lawyer working for the Bush campaign whose advisory work for the Swift Boat Veterans led him to resign from the campaign) and a host of campaign fundraising honchos.

As I had just written, with my colleague Nancy Watzman, a book called Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day, this discovery was pure serendipity. Finally, after documenting all the ways wealthy special interests cash in on lucrative favors from Washington, DC, here was an unrestricted peak at life at the very top of the fundraising pyramid.

Just one-tenth of 1 percent of all Americans gave the maximum individual contribution of $2,000 to a candidate in 2004, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. An even tinier group, a little over 1,000 men and a handful of women, were the super-bundlers for the major presidential candidates of both parties.

[Nothing Without Hope]

1. Thanks! Ends on an interesting note, too

(snip)

As best as I could tell, the only thing that bothered Brad Freeman about the money chase was how long it goes on, not what harm it does to our elected officials, or how it undermines the public's faith in being fairly represented.

And yet, even Brad Freeman, Bush fundraiser extraordinaire, seems to know that there is something dangerously rotten about the work he does so well.

(snip)

"Something dangerously rotten." Pretty strong language; good to see it in TN even if it is only in a "comment."