Successful Senate candidates raised an average of more than $14,000 per day during the last election cycle — a sum that campaign finance reform advocates said shows a system begging for an overhaul.
Now this is change you can believe in: After eschewing big-money donations for first inauguration four years ago, President Obama was asking for donations up to $1 million to help him throw the two big inaugural balls.
For an administration that touts its desire to make a clean break with its predecessor, President Obama and his aides have taken to citing President George W. Bush's White House tenure several times lately when challenged on the same type of indiscretions they once condemned.
With charisma and national name recognition but no imminent political prospects, onetime Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain is using the donor-fueled political action committee created in his name in unusual ways.
Despite the return by President Obama and the Democratic Party of a tainted $10,000 donation from D.C. fundraiser Jeffrey E. Thompson, dozens of other federal and local campaign committees, Democrat and Republican alike, continue to hold on to tens of thousands of dollars they have received from the contractor now at the center of Mayor Vincent C. Gray's deepening fundraising scandal, records show.
President Obama — who analysts originally thought would be history's first $1 billion presidential candidate — lowered that bar Tuesday, warning donors instead that he now expects to be outspent by the GOP this year.
As the presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich persevered despite no realistic prospect of victory, the former House speaker spent lavishly on the trappings of a more-successful, high-profile campaign, spending more on travel and security in March than Mitt Romney did, records show.
A serious turn in the federal probe of D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray's 2010 campaign and a recent trickle of subpoenas to D.C. Council members is delving into the tricky — and supposedly arms-length — role that candidates play at the roulette wheel of political funding and influence.
Businesses owned for years by prominent D.C. contractor Jeffrey Thompson engaged in a pattern of political giving that appears to run afoul of city campaign finance law, combining to give twice and sometimes three times the maximum donation to city politicians in a single day, records show.
