Political Campaigns

The April 26 front-page article " Behind the ads, faceless donors " highlighted what is going on in funding today's political campaigns. Thanks to the Supreme Court decision on campaign financing, corporations and well-to-do individuals can provide unlimited financing to candidates running for office. Case in point: Newt Gingrich would not have been able to stay in the GOP presidential race as long as he did without the one wealthy donor to his campaign. We need to ask ourselves, will this type of funding place undue power in the...

Sputtering adjectives — outrageous, appalling, intolerable — can scarcely do justice to the fiasco involving the Internal Revenue Service's reported targeting of conservative groups . But the current scandal obscures — and, ironically, threatens to prevent action on — another, equally corrosive failure on the part of the IRS when it comes to scrutinizing political groups. This less-noticed scandal is the mirror image of the one dominating the front page. It's not that the IRS has been too tough on such groups — it's...

It turns out, politicians are human, too. Watching seasoned politicians at work, it's difficult to imagine that they ever suffered from self-doubt. But in 60 hours of oral history interviews, men and women who now shape government policy revealed disappointments, exhilarations, vulnerabilities and humbling moments from their first political campaigns — campaigns that formed the foundation of their public careers. They ran for different reasons. Some first ran...

President Obama marked the end of a contentious election cycle when he took the oath of office during last week's inauguration, but several of Washington's politically driven upstarts hope a break from campaigns doesn't mean a break for business. Ruck.us , for example, predicts 2013 could be a bigger boon than the presidential election for its social network, which connects politically like-minded people . Without the natural outlet for political expression that campaigns provide, the civically engaged...

Corporate contributions to D.C. political funds would be banned for the first time if a ballot initiative proposed by a group of city activists succeeds. Bryan Weaver, a former D.C. Council candidate and advisory neighborhood commissioner in Adams Morgan, and Sylvia Brown, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Deanwood, filed papers Tuesday on behalf of the "D.C. Committee to Restore Public Trust" to begin the initiative process. The effect of the proposal — should the organizers gather...

Big donors considering whether to work the phones raising money for President Obama's reelection campaign might consider the fate of his 2008 bundlers. Many of them, it turns out, won plum jobs in his administration. Obama campaigned on what he called "the most sweeping ethics reform in history" and has frequently criticized the role of money in politics. That hasn't stopped him from offering government jobs to some of his biggest bundlers, volunteer fundraisers who gather...

Empty desks line the dimly lit elementary classroom. A map of the United States hangs on the wall. As quiet music plays, the camera pulls back and prison bars close over the sobering scene. "Imagine if your entire future was determined by what you did in the third grade," says Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in a television advertisement promoting his plan to expand preschool. "Did you know we use the failure rates of third-graders to help predict how many prison spots Virginia will need in 15 years?"

With looks and brains, a résumé that lists a stint as President Obama's chief technology officer and supporters that include some of the Washington region's wealthiest Indian Americans, Aneesh P. Chopra is a fast-rising star from an immigrant community that is eager to parlay its wealth and education into political influence. Chopra, an Arlington County resident who left the White House in July to launch his campaign for lieutenant governor of Virginia, is...

One of the most polarizing fights over money in politics has been unfolding this spring at annual corporate meetings, where shareholders are mounting an intensifying effort to push companies to disclose the money they spend on lobbying and political campaigns. The transparency push, playing out at shareholders meetings from coast to coast this spring, has received cheers from campaign finance reformers and some corporate governance experts. It has drawn ridicule from critics such as the ...

Tony Schwartz, 84, whose genius in audio recording resulted in the most famous political advertisement ever run and in a huge archive of New York sounds, instantly recognizable commercials and anti-smoking public service announcements, died June 15 of heart valve stenosis at his New York City home. Mr. Schwartz's "Daisy" ad for President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 campaign aired just once but is cited as one of the first, most effective examples of negative television political ads. In it, the...

THE CAMPAIGN is over, but the broken campaign finance system remains. The flood of money into politics in the past two years, including millions of dollars from hidden donors, was unlike anything since the post-Watergate reforms of the 1970s and will only grow worse unless something is done. Many fingers have been pointed at the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision for opening the floodgates to unlimited donations by corporations, wealthy citizens and labor unions. Certainly, that was a major factor but not the only one. The biggest...

As Mitt Romney has moved to the center in an effort to overtake President Barack Obama in the campaign's homestretch, he has by necessity muted — or even muddied — his previous opposition to abortion rights, a shift that has left some abortion foes aghast. But veteran anti-abortion leaders say they are confident that Romney remains committed to their agenda and, in the final weeks before the Nov. 6 vote, they are busy trying to keep rank-and-file...

Caroline Hunter is chair of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), an independent regulatory agency that administers and enforces the law which governs the financing of federal elections. Hunter was appointed to the commission by President George W. Bush in 2008. She previously served as the vice-chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and as deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison. Hunter spoke with Tom Fox, who writes the...

EUGENE A. DELGAUDIO, a Republican member of Loudoun County's Board of Supervisors, acknowledges ordering staffers in his office to comb through spreadsheets of political donors — on county time and in county offices. His motives, he told The Post's Caitlin Gibson , were aboveboard and nonpolitical: to raise money for a boys' football league in his district. In fact, league officials told us, Mr. Delgaudio sent one fundraising letter on the league's behalf, several years ago, and occasionally referred league...

As debate rages this year over the increasing influence of corporations on politics, a new study finds that more companies are deciding to disclose their contributions to interest groups in the hope of avoiding controversy. The Center for Political Accountability found that nearly 60 percent of leading Fortune 500 companies either disclose their corporate political contributions or have adopted policies refraining from making such donations. The center, which urges corporations to disclose their...

by Ellen McCarthy Throughout her life, Anne Gregory has made a lot of decisions that no one expected. Growing up in Rome, Ga., as the daughter of a Baptist music minister, she dreamed of being an opera star. But at the University of Miami, she switched her major from music to religious studies, then she focused on Holocaust theology in graduate school at Vanderbilt University. Moved by the religion's focus on social justice, she converted to Judaism in 2005. By then she had...

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case pitting a group of Nigerians against Royal Dutch Shell, which has been accused of complicity in torture and executions in Nigeria. According to an Oct. 18 news story , "The lower [U.S.] courts are divided about whether only an individual may be sued under the [alien tort] statute or whether it extends to cover corporations. " Since the Supreme Court has already decided that, when it comes to contributions to political campaigns, corporations are just like individuals, the...

With looks and brains, a résumé that lists a stint as President Obama's chief technology officer and supporters that include some of the Washington region's wealthiest Indian Americans, Aneesh P. Chopra is a fast-rising star from an immigrant community that is eager to parlay its wealth and education into political influence. Chopra, an Arlington County resident who left the White House in July to launch his campaign for lieutenant governor of Virginia, is an unabashed geek who sees high-tech...

A recent Gallup Poll provides a clue as to why Democrats largely ignored federal employees in the platform issued at the party's Charlotte convention this week. The public thinks government stinks. When Gallup asked more than 1,000 people for their views on 25 industries in August, Uncle Sam's shop claimed the 24th slot, one step above the oil and gas industry and just below banking. Sam's 23 percent positive rating this year is six percentage points higher than last year, which was the...