Apparently John McCain has very little regard for the laws he authors. One of the flagships of his legislative list of achievements is taking quite a beating at the hands of the McCain campaign and their legal pitbulls. According to an article by Michael Luo in the New York Times, McCain is doing everything in his power to stretch the campaign finance limits to their maximum dimensions in every direction possible. Whether the actions are legal is debateable, that they were not intended by the legislation is unquestionable. The lawyer McCain is using to assist in these efforts, Trevor Potter, once headed a watchdog group which opposed all these techniques.
The first technique is the compliance fund. It allows a candidate continue to raise funds privately after accepting public financing as long as those funds are used to cover the costs of complying with the law. The trick is, and Kerry used it, to use this money to cover part of your advertising, because you have to run those little notices saying the candidate approves this message. Of Course, in his capacity as head of a watchdog group, Potter vigorously opposed this. But now as a McCain minion he champions it. Oh, by the way, the McCain campaign refuses to make Mr. Potter available for interviews.
The next technique involves the joint fund raising efforts. McCain has taken this to a new level by adding $10,000 contributions to state party accounts to the $2300 to compliance fund and the $28,500 to the Republican party. Even ignoring the fact that these sort of contributions were precisely what the campaign finance laws were trying to stop, the way McCain is doing his fundraising is extremely questionable. He is soliciting these large contributions on his campaign website, with only fine print explaining where these large contributions are going. Obama does not solicit for his joint fundraising committee on his website.
The next technique is to then split the costs of advertisements with the Republican party, and potentially taking it one step further also split the costs with the state parties. This really makes a mockery of campaign finance limits. The FEC deadlocked on the legality of this, so it's full speed ahead for McCain. As his lawyer argued in his capacity as head of a watchdog group, everyone of these techniques is a violation of the intentions of the law, but that holds little sway with the bills author. The man who continues to campaign on his reputation as a reformer shows once again that the reforms he champions should not apply to him. Does Obama really have to explain why he opted out of public financing?