Oink Oink
A look at the money game of all three candidates. What? Don’t you recognize them?
As a followup to Michaels post below about earmark spending, I decided to go looking around at the records of all three candidates in terms of earmarks and campaign donations.
McCain indeed has an officially clean slate when it comes to earmarks, though that doesn’t stop him from having, “pet projects“.
How about the Democrats?
First let me note that I’m not certain, in the links ahead, whether the “defense earmarks” are contemplated in the full list, so I’m going to ignore them. Go to the links yourself for full detail.
Well, if we first look at Obama, we see he’s clearly not incapable of jumping on the earmark bandwagon. He’s appropriated 3.3 million dollars in earmarks and he’s recieved some $97,250 in campaign contributions from the beneficiaries of his earmarks.
So what happens when we move on to Clinton? Ohhhh boy. Dear Hillary has over 102 million dollars in earmarks, and has recieved $378,660 in campaign contributions from the companies that benefited. Even if you count that Clinton has been in the senate longer than Obama that still leaves an average appropriation of 14.57 million dollars per year for her vs. his 1.1 million dollars, well over ten times more.
What about lobbyists? Well, according to this site Hillary Clinton is far and away the one recieving the most love in this election. She has recieved $783,290, almost twice as much as the second runner up McCain, who has recieved $453,365. Obama trails both of them, with just $99,240, well behind even hopeless nominees like Chris Dodd.
Of course the reality is probably much more complex. According to this report, McCain, though he recieves less money from lobbyists, employs more of them. On the Democratic side of the remaining candidates Clinton was the top employer of former lobbyists while Obama had no lobbyists. It should be noted that the report was originally from the Huffington Post is not an agenda-free zone, so the piece should be taken with a grain of salt, though I think it’s at the very least indicative of a tendency.
