WASHINGTON-While calling for campaign finance reform amid Justice Department and congressional investigations of Democratic fund-raising irregularities, President Clinton unapologetically mingled with high-rolling contributors at the lavish town house of wireless entrepreneur Shelby Bryan last Tuesday night in New York’s Upper East Side.
The president’s appearance at the dinner helped raise a reported $1.2 million for Senate Democrats, with donors giving $10,000 for individual candidates and $25,000 for party-building activities.
In doing so, the event blithely ignored the Democratic National Committee’s vow-urged by Clinton himself-to voluntarily limit political contributions.
That prompted Clinton to be labeled a hypocrite and to be mocked in public.
Kent Cooper, president of the Center for Responsive Politics, was quoted as saying, “It’s a clear indication that he’s not sincere or willing to put into practice what he preaches.”
Bryan, who hosted the event with his wife, Katherine, and who has attended White House coffees several times (as have other wireless industry executives), is president of IntelCom Group Inc. and former chairman of Millicom International Communications.
The Clinton administration has been a big supporter of the wireless telecom industry, which brought him not only political contributions to help facilitate his re-election, but $22 billion in spectrum auction pledges to further two top priorities the second go-round: improving education (through technology and other means) and balancing the budget.
The president signed an executive order in 1995 to force federal government agencies to make their buildings and land available for antenna siting and provided fanfare for an anti-crime program last year to supply neighborhood watch groups with cellular phones.
In addition, former U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor pried opened Japan’s cellular market on behalf of Motorola Inc. a few years back. Kantor’s successor, Charlene Barshefsky, has led the United States to major global accords to open telecommunications equipment and service markets.
Late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown helped wireless telecommunications executives and others get a foot in the door in many of the world’s emerging markets like, China, Russia, Latin America, Africa and India, where telecommunications infrastructure is underdeveloped or nonexistent and growth potential enormous.
The president continues to try to minimize and distance himself from the growing-and potentially debilitating-political scandal as his second term unfolds.
“It was wrong not to check those contributions,” said Clinton, referring to the returned $1.8 million in contributions raised by former Commerce Department trade official and DNC fund raiser John Huang and Charles Yah Lin Trie, a restaurateur, and like Huang, a Clinton friend from Little Rock, Ark.
The president noted that the returned contributions accounted for less than two percent of Democratic contributions. A record $2.7 billion was taken was taken in by both parties, with Republicans raising twice as much as Democrats in the last election cycle.
GOP-led congressional investigations, which accounted for the 72 subpoenas last week, are probing whether all Democratic contributions were legal; whether they bought White House access, including coveted seats secured by wireless executives on trade missions to nations with emerging markets; whether they influenced trade and foreign policy; and whether they invited economic espionage and threatened national security.
Nevertheless, the president praised Democratic contributors, “knowing you might be targeted for the exercise of your constitutional right to stand up and support the people you believe in.”
Though Clinton blames the DNC for fund-raising excesses, there is mounting evidence that he, Vice President Gore and White House aides, orchestrated the massive DNC fund-raising effort from the start.
Liberal New York Post columnist Jack Newfield, attributing a lengthy interview with a White House aide, wrote Feb. 16 that Clinton created the pressure and the atmosphere for abuse when he told advisers at a secret strategy session in May 1995 that he couldn’t be re-elected unless $10 million to $15 million were raised for a television ad blitz.
The ad campaign, which former Clinton consultant Dick Morris takes credit for, skirted the federal $37 million spending cap by highlighting Clinton issues without mentioning the president himself.
Special associate White House Counsel Lanny Davis, responding to Newfield’s column on NBC’s Feb. 16 Meet the Press, said, “Someone in the room who said that is just flat out wrong.”
Davis said the president “has acknowledged mistakes. These things are in excess, they occur in campaigns but it’s one thing to say they occur; it’s another thing to say that the president approved or encouraged it.”
Meanwhile, Clinton is unlikely to get cooperation from his own party or the GOP-controlled Congress as a whole for voluntary fund-raising curbs or for campaign finance reform legislation sponsored by John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.).
Campaign finance reform works well for the re-elected Clinton, but not others. Congressional Democrats, facing re-election and having access to a smaller pool of political money than Republicans, don’t want fund raising curtailed. Neither do Republicans, who are better than Democrats at it.
The Democratic fund-raising imbroglio, which threatens Senate confirmation of Clinton Labor Secretary nominee Alexis Herman and Central Intelligence Agency designate Anthony Lake, has become the subject of humor outside the serious confines of the Belt Way.
According to press reports, an electronic billboard that the presidential motorcade drove by in Manhattan flashed, “Hey, Mr. Clinton. Coffee at Fairway is 65 cents. Coffee at the White House is $200,000. And ours tastes better.”
