Who are "Good Will" & "Doodad Pro"?
 

Interesting Op-Ed piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today, especially about the foreign money. You can read the entire article here.


"Funny money
Who's funding the Obama campaign? And why isn't the media finding out?

Sunday, October 05, 2008
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Who is "Will, Good"?

"Mr. Good Will -- who lists his employer as "Loving" and his profession as "You" -- has contributed 1,000 times to the Barack Obama campaign.

"All the contributions have been in amounts of $25 or less. But they add up to $17,375 -- far more than the legal limit of $4,600 ($2,300 each for the primary and general election campaigns).
"Kenneth Timmerman, a reporter for NewsMax, a conservative Web site, discovered Mr. Good Will when he reviewed 1.4 million individual contributions in the latest Federal Elections Commission master file for the Obama campaign...."

Again, the rest is here.

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Interesting. Obama should disclose the names of all of his donors.

Did anyone see the outcome of the RNC request to the FEC today about Obama's foreign donors?

It's on Reuters now, so apparently the media is picking it up. I do hope they straighten it out.

This does bring up a lot of questions about Internet donations. It seems it would be nearly impossible to know whether people are using real names or not. Buy some gift card Visas, donate away, under as many different names as you want. It's all pretty anonymous really. Interesting. Additionally, one could make the candidate they didn't like look bad by making numerous donations that way. I'm guessing something will end up changing with that method of donating.

They are filing the complaint tomorrow with the request, according to AP.

It's funny to me, for some reason, that the RNC would send out emails to some people, like the Instapundit blog, and hold a press conference, before they actually filed the complaint. It kind of makes it seems like they must be afraid there's less to it than the hype they are trying to build.

I also find it kind of annoying on a different level that it's this easy to get away with not complying with the FEC stuff. It drives me crazy that I come up with a map to my house, no less, on the Huffington Post campaign donation tracker for my little primary donation. I suppose it never occurred to me to just lie about who I was and that if I had thought about it, I would have assumed that negative consequences would either follow for me or my candidate.

Perhaps the solution is to require that all donations be traceable some way.

Yes, he should. So should John McCain.

If we went with the plan I outlined in one of these threads, no campaign contributions would be necessary and this would become a non-issue :)

You mean like this:

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Donors/

Exactly!

I agree, it should all be public. I hope they get to the bottom of it. It seems like it all should be traceable through IP address and stuff. I do remember being surprised about how much information they needed about me when I made a donation. It kind of creeped me out but I guess I understand why they needed the info now. It seems it would be most useful to have the info in a spreadsheet type format. It would be hard to find things like the Will, Good stuff through a search like that because you'd have to attempt every last name in the world to find things like that. It seems hit or miss.

This is all stuff I never really thought about it before and it makes my brain hurt! But, I guess campaign managers, etc. are used to thinking about all this... programming the database to add up all the contributions from a particular individual, how to give money back if someone donates more than is allowed by law, etc.

Good to see some talk about this. I can understand that the net is the quickest way to generate the money (or is that MONEY?) for a campaign, but at some point, there has to be accountability.

What definitely shakes me up is the amount of foreign donors. Other than Americans living abroad, there really shouldn't be anyone involved enough in our election to make donations. There should never be a price tag on the United States.

He does, to the FEC. He discloses the names of all of his donors above $300 to the public. Some of it is a quantity issue.

He's also refunded the money paid by the unverifiable names, prior to the story coming out, the campaign hasn't processed the ones listed yet, it takes at least a month.

ETA: McCain's is after the fact. It'd be easy for Obama to release donors in several months when everything's been processed. McCain is using public financing so he has no current donors.

Thanks for the clarification, Drolefille.

Why didn't the article include the fact that Obama has refunded unverifiable names thus far? That's certainly not the impression given by the writer.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/162403

Here's another article. Interesting to note the difference in the wording. For example the brothers in Gaza who purchased T-shirts in bulk, entirely different perspectives on it.

The Obama campaign also refunds any money donated by a lobbyist.


In the end it's just as likely that fake contributions are going to the non-campaign orgs supporting McCain. But here's my view on it, I'm not worried that Obama's going to be beholden to the special interests of Mr. Good Will and friends because we're talking a) little money and b) anonymous donor. Unless the President of Iran calls up and says "Obama I donated 38k to your campaign, do my bidding" I really don't see an issue. And even then the amount is trivial in the face of all the real verified donations Obama's received this campaign.

ETA: this article is what I read first, http://campaignspot.nationalreview.c...E0ZTZkZjNhNzg= I'm not a fan of the site, but in it you'll see that the campaign records reported that X number of donations had already been refunded even though currently there was still a positive balance. Hence my comments about the time it takes to process that sort of refund.

It just seems that the McCain campaign is desperately grabbing at straws to make Obama look bad. It just makes them look worse, and I know John McCain is better than this.

False, this makes Obama look worse.

It's all a matter of perspective as to who looks worse.

It's all a matter of opinion, but to me, this smacks of the same desperate straw-grabbing that HRC was doing back in late May/early June. When you're on the losing side of the equation, and you're coming up with obscure things to try to attack your more successful opponent yes, it makes you look pretty bad.

The difference is, I would expect this nonsense from the Clintons, as their unchecked, no-holds barred ambition is common knowledge. Again, I thought McCain was better than this.

Certainly, Obama's task is different because the fundraising is ongoing, but he could have made the same data available that McCain did through the primary season had he wanted to.

At the risk of seeming to want to score cheap points, I will also note that Obama could also have elected to honor his initial pledge to rely on public financing.

I agree with you in doubting these donors are probably actually dangerous somehow. But it does point to a pretty big flaw in the system. And as someone who reported like I was supposed to, even for my small donation, and found myself linked on the internet as a result, it just bugs me that other people are playing games with the system. (The donors, not Obama.)

I'll admit it, I'm a little freaked out by the foreign donors more than anything else. It's been a while since I've known all the fine print of electoral law, but I always thought that foreign donors were supposed to be under much more scrutiny than they currently are.

I'm fairly certain you can't accept any foreign donations from non-citizens. Hence why those guys money was returned when they discovered that "Ga." meant "Gaza" not "Georgia."