By Denis Campbell

Pssst, buddy, wanna buy a Presidency? It’s gonna cost ya! A truism in life I learned, is when a person with money meets a person with experience, the person with the experience ends up with the money and the person with the money ends up with an experience.

National campaigns are the ultimate Washington insider gravy trains. Normally candidates and gamblers are measured by how much money or ‘skin’ they themselves put in the game. Multi-millionaire former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney put $6 million dollars+ of his own money into his failed primary bid. 

Smart national campaign operative find ways to take money out of the game, on literally everything. To quote from the great sage Dr. Seuss, “Oh the places I have been and the things I have seen…” From percentage finder’s fees (you and I would uncharitably call them kickbacks) on office rental leases, to a cut of every piece of office equipment or stationery leased or bought, to 10-20% of every printing contract, web services, a percentage of the creative budget (from the agency in which they usually have a controlling interest) to the grand-daddy of them all, becoming their own media buying agency and taking the 16.5% commission mark-up on the huge ad buy. The service-oriented members of this club, run their own opinion poll shops and even earn commissions running the candidate’s speaker’s bureau. 

If there is a way to squeeze points out of every deal, theirs are the first piggy noses n the trough. And most candidates cannot bother to be bothered about it. Since most of them are lobbyist lawyers to begin with, they wrote the campaign finance laws they operate under, so as far as a candidate is concerned, just keep it legal, avoid drama or you’re out and the giant machine whirs along silently like a submarine running in deep silent mode.

Said one former Kerry insider, “If you are one of the top 2-3 closest to the candidate, you literally have a blank cheque. No one cares, because everyone does it.”  This is why those positions are so hard fought for.

For the first time in history, candidates running for President in 2008 will have raised and spent more than $1 Billion dollars (!) trying to get there. Most in the EU gasp at that amount of money, (£650 million pounds). Through the end of September the chart below show the spending of the finalists. Barack Obama in September had the single largest fund raising month in recorded campaign history when $66 million dollars rolled in. He could raise $100 million in October alone on top his already impressive $450 million total.

Campaign Fund Raising for the finalists

While more than half of what is raised goes to buy advertising time on telly in major US Metropolitan markets, the seedy underbelly of campaign financing is the amount of money paid to Washington insider staff/lobbyists.

This first reared its ugly head when Senator Clinton ended her campaign with a $20 million dollar debt, $7 million+ of it owed to one Washington insider, Democratic strategist and campaign manager Mark Penn. While Obama did personal appearances and asked his folks to help Senator Clinton retire her debt, not many were thrilled to see the architect of the divisive 3:00 am phone call advert and other attacks benefit from their campaign. It may be business as usual in Washington, but to cut your own party’s man as badly and deeply as she and Bill did well… those wounds run a bit deep.

John McCain’s campaign manager has foregone his salary the last two months due to a campaign cash crunch. Rick Davis was making $20,000 a month (a cool quarter million dollar executive salary). Of course he still had an interest according to Newsweek in Davis Manafort which earned $15,000 a month from Fannie and Freddie before they cratered in the financial meltdown and other interesting deals. 

There will be no need though for a Rick Davis Charity Dinner nor will he be applying for food stamps or unemployment benefits any time soon after the campaign ends in three weeks. It seems, according to the Daily Kos and Newsweek, that Rick funnelled deferred compensation through an Internet firm he owned called 3eDC. It’s address was the same office building as Davis Manafort’s his old lobbying firm with whom he so publicly “broke all ties” yet remained, as of last month, an officer/director of the company. 3eDC received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, totalling $971,860 through March 2008.

So I guess there is more than one meaning to Sarah Palin’s mantra, “Drill baby drill!”