THE IRON LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:

Follow the money: Forget Howard Dean's mouth. The real issue facing the Democrats is dollars. (Chris Suellentrop, June 26, 2005, Boston Globe)

The cliché is that political money is like water: If you try to block it, it will simply divert itself into another stream. But a study by Weissman and Ruth Hassan of the Campaign Finance Institute found that the analogy isn't quite right. They focused on 73 super-size donors, who had given $50 million in soft money to the two parties in 2000 and 2002. After soft money was banned by McCain-Feingold, these donors ended up giving $157 million to 527s in 2004 (mostly, but not exclusively, Democratic groups).

''Clearly what was happening was not only a shift in their soft money giving, from party to 527, but also a vast escalation in their total donations," Weissman and Hassan write.

What explains the phenomenon? One possibility is that 527 donors are getting more bang for their political buck. In 2004, George Soros exerted more influence over the strategy and tactics of America Coming Together than he ever could have over the Democratic Party proper.

''If you were allowed by law to give $20 million to the Democratic National Committee, of course you would get your phone calls returned," says York. ''But I think with a nonparty group like America Coming Together, you get even better service. Because they don't have to worry about keeping you at arm's length." (The same holds true, of course, for such conservative 527s as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and Progress for America.)

In short, it looks as though McCain-Feingold actually increased the influence that big donors have over progressive politics, even though it diverted their money from the institution of the Democratic Party.

It's all well and good that CFR is anti-Democratic, but it's unacceptably anti-democratic as well.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 26, 2005 10:50 AM