Monday, April 21, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Happy FEC Day
All the candidates have released their FEC reports today. McCain's report, the Politico suggests, cements the prediction that he will accept public funds in the general. This has one obvious outcome -- he will be outspent badly. Very badly -- and one slightly less obvious one: He'll also be going to the Republican National Committee for help in paying for advertising, thus hanging Congressional Republicans out to dry. Already being out-fundraised by the Dems, the NRCC and the NRSC won't be able to rely on the RNC to bail out candidates not lucky enough to be running in swing states, because the RNC will be splitting the cost of McCain's campaign with, well, the American taxpayer.
Before you get too upset, the RNC will be paying a bigger chunk than you, likely paying out the $19M that national party committees can spend promoting specific candidates, plus millions more via ads that promote "both the party and the candidate," a controversial accounting feature invented by the Bush campaign in 2004. Oh, and since McCain will be raising money for the party rather than for his own campaign, donations can come in at a maximum of $28,500 per person, rather than the skimpy $2,300 chunks that have formed the basis for Clinton and Obama's bankrolls.
This pretty much is the opposite of the kind of campaign McCain would ideally want to run, on many different levels.
In other news, Obama spent $16K on Facebook.
About Swampland
Ana Marie Cox is the founding editor of Wonkette and the author of the novel Dog Days. Read more
Joe Klein is TIME's political columnist and author of six books, most recently Politics Lost. His weekly TIME column, "In the Arena," covers national and international affairs. In 2004 he won the National Headliner Award for best magazine column. Read more
Senior Writer Karen Tumulty has been TIME's National Political Correspondent since 2001, and has also covered the White House and Congress for the magazine. A native of San Antonio, she is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard Business School, where her career choice has significantly lowered the average salary of her graduating class. But she gets lots of free magazines. Read more
Jay Carney is TIME's Washington bureau chief. He has covered both the Clinton and Bush 43 White Houses, as well as Congress. Before coming to Washington, he spent three years reporting from TIME's Moscow bureau. In his next life, he would like to write for Sports Illustrated. Read more
Jay Newton-Small Jay Newton-Small covers politics for TIME. She has covered the Bush 43 White House and also Congress from the DeLay era to the present. And, yes, despite the misleading name SHE is a she. Read more
Michael Scherer is a correspondent in TIME's Washington bureau covering the 2008 presidential campaign. He has worked national assignments for Mother Jones magazine and Salon.com. Read more
Mike Murphy is a political consultant who helped elect more than a dozen GOP Senators and Governors including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney. In 2000, Murphy was a senior strategist for John McCain's presidential campaign.
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