They've got the game rigged

I have been trying to understand how the McCain campaign and the RNC can be running joint commercials against Barack Obama. I have understood that there were prohibitions against coordination between a campaign and the party committee. Otherwise, wouldn't the contribution limits that the campaign must adhere to be pointless, to the extent that McCain (or any other candidate) could use the much more significant funds contributed by the same people to the RNC?

Has something changed? (Did McCain write a loophole into McCain-Feingold that exempts himself from coverage?)

This is a serious question. And it turns out that those prohibitions on coordination between the campaign and the party are pretty flimsy.

Advertising Age recently had this to say:

The McCain camp will get $85 million in federal financing, and typically the party would only be able to spend $19 million on any effort it coordinates with the McCain campaign. By not coordinating messages with either the McCain campaign or the Republican National Committee itself, the GOP independent-expenditure unit can raise and spend money that will come in handy to a McCain camp hemmed in by federal financing rules.

By reading that technical description of the rules by Advertising Age, however, one may get a bit too favorable an impression as to the structure of fundraising and spending limitations in the campaign finance laws.

But one (but not "That One", who actually gets it) would be wrong to believe that those rules work in a way to prevent unethical campaign financing behavior, rather than reward manipulation of rules that look like they were designed expressly for manipulation. As described in this article in Bloomberg by Jonathan D. Salant, entitled "McCain, Obama Avoid Spending Limits, Undermine Public Financing":

The RNC is allowed to spend $19 million of its money in coordination with McCain's campaign. On top of that, McCain's campaign and the Republican Party can split the cost of so-called hybrid ads promoting both the presidential ticket and the party. There's no limit on how much party organizations can spend on efforts that aren't coordinated with the presidential campaign committee.

"It's fully understood that all this money is being raised to be spent on behalf of McCain's campaign," said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, a Washington-based advocacy group that supports stronger campaign finance laws. "That entirely defeats the public financing and the spending limits."

So there is some coordinated advertising permitted. But even worse, this makes clear what we already know - that the entire campaign financing system is broken. Barack Obama stepped outside of the system so that he could compete, and John McCain feels no compunction about avoiding the intent of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance statute that bears his name, even through raising funds for the RNC on his campaign website, which funds will be used in "uncoordinated" attacks on Senator Obama. On the one hand I want to point out that, as with torture, gay marriage, environmental protection and numerous other issues, campaign finance reform provides another example where McCain's purported convictions on an issue (and his sponsorship of statutes) seem to bear little relevance to his actual deeds. But this isn't just a McCain problem, it's an institutional one.

It's clear that if a campaign and the party committee are coordinating on the spending of $19 million, they will be using the opportunity to coordinate more broadly to enable the independent-expenditure unit to go off and spend on its own in a way that ties in precisely with the candidate's campaign needs.

The campaign finance laws are a sham. Like we didn't know that already.