...Michael Winship: What about the money? I mean that must be an enormous difference as well, the amount of money in politics now.
Matea Gold: Sure, and so President Obama really changed that singlehandedly when he went outside the public finance system in 2008, decided not to take matching federal funds in the general election, which meant he could raise and spend unlimited amounts.
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the Center for Responsive Politics came out with their best calculation for the 2012 race and it was $6.3 billion. And that’s a really rough estimate because a lot of these outside groups are formed as 501(c)(4), so-called nonprofit social welfare organizations that don’t report their spending and they don’t report their donors. And so possibly hundreds of millions of dollars more were spent trying to influence the presidential campaign that we have no way to account for.
Michael Winship: Trevor Potter today, from the Campaign Legal Center, referred to the 501(c)(4)s as “pirate flags of convenience.”
Matea Gold: [laughs] Yeah. I think that, you know, there was a real focus on super PACs after the 2010 races and after 2012, but I think the real story is with their kind of dark box cousin, which are these (c)(4)s that offer the same kind of freedom to spend and raise these unlimited sums without the transparency. And President Obama has now embraced a group like that to advocate on behalf of his second term agenda, so I think that is a real turning point in our politics.
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