100 Politics and elections
writers, organisers, and press officers, means that it is impossible to fight a
presidential election without considerable financial resources, and at each
election the costs rise. Raising money becomes an essential and arduous task
for the candidates’ supporters. In 2004 the Republican National Committee
spent $45.8 million on generic media advertising; the Democratic National
Committee spent $24 million. Money cannot guarantee success in an elec-
tion, but it surely helps, and increasingly candidates for office are drawn from
individuals who can make a significant contribution to their campaign from
their own resources. Clearly, if one candidate has access to a great deal of
money and another is starved of finance, the outcome of the election may be
affected by this difference in resources, and those who contribute money may
have a claim on the successful candidate for services rendered. The problem
of finding a balance between allowing candidates the necessary freedom to
attempt to convince the electorate, but at the same time to avoid corruption,
is an ever-present one in a democracy. In the United States a number of
rather ineffectual attempts were made to deal with this problem, but the
Watergate affair, with its revelations about the activities of the Committee to
Re-elect the President, led Congress to pass the Federal Election Campaign
Act (FECA) in 1974. The Act laid down strict rules regarding the report-
ing of campaign contributions and expenditures, and also set limits to the
amounts that could be contributed by an individual ($1,000) or an organisa-
tion ($5,000), to any one candidate.
The Act also set limits to the amount a candidate might spend on his or
her own election, but this provision was declared unconstitutional by the Su-
preme Court. These restrictions, however, are not as effective as they might
seem. There was no limit set to the number of ‘organisations’ that might
contribute to a candidate’s expenses, and as a result large numbers of ‘Politi-
cal Action Committees’ (PACs) were set up to contribute to the funding of
candidates’ campaign expenses – another aspect of the way in which interest
groups, rather than the political parties themselves, are the essential chan-
nels of political action in America.
The 1974 Act, however, failed to prevent the continuing increase in the
growth of campaign expenditures, in part because of a loophole in the law
which allowed ‘soft money’ to be contributed to the campaign by individuals
or organisations. ‘Hard money’ was the term used to describe the contribu-
tions made directly to named candidates, which were regulated by the Fed-
eral Election Campaign Act. However, the Act did not prevent individuals or
organisations from making contributions to a political party, and this money
could be used to pay for television advertisements supporting or attacking
particular policies; this became known as ‘soft money’. Television and other
advertisements paid for by soft money could even refer to a candidate by
name, provided that the advertisement did not contain the phrases ‘vote for’
or ‘vote against’. In the election of 2000 a total of $495 million in soft money
was raised by the parties.
As a result of the outcry against this use of soft money the Bipartisan Cam-