Hillary, Jeb and fundraising for 2016

By Frank Bruni

Sunday, March 1, 2015 | 2:01 a.m.

A few weeks ago brought the comedy extravaganza of the “Saturday Night Live” reunion, but not one of its sketches or jokes was half as funny as four words three days later by Jeb Bush.

“I’m my own man,” he said.

And he kept a straight face somehow.

The remark came during a foreign policy speech in Chicago, and he was making clear that he was no slave to the policies and priorities of his father, the 41st president, or his older brother, the 43rd.

I’ll buy that.

But immediately following the speech, donors sought to buy him.

It was estimated that at back-to-back fundraisers, he hauled in about $4 million for his Right to Rise PAC and for a super PAC that supports him.

This was on top of another $4 million he reportedly netted the previous week in one evening alone at the Manhattan home of a private equity bigwig. After Manhattan came the Washington, D.C., area, where he racked up $1 million at two events, according to Politico. An atlas of cities, an avalanche of dough: It’s what successful campaigns are made of, and his is expected to raise between $50 million and $100 million over a span of three months.

Those dollars come with expectations. Money almost always does.

Bush is no more his own man than Hillary Clinton is her own woman. And in her case, too, I’m not talking about the imprint of her family, specifically a husband who served two terms in the White House and still looms impossibly large and loquacious on the post-presidential stage.

I’m talking about financial ties — past, present, future. I’m talking about the reality, growing ever more pronounced and ominous, that you can’t run for a major, fiercely contested political office in this country without becoming a monstrous, ceaseless, insatiable Hoover of money.

The Clintons suck it in like no one before them, with a dearth of caution that boggles the mind. Stories in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post recently tabulated and detailed the fundraising of the Clinton Foundation over the past decade and a half, calculating that it had raised $2 billion.

And the sources of some of that money should give us pause. As The Wall Street Journal reported, “Recent donors include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.”

There are firm and necessary laws against American candidates accepting foreign donations. There’s no such prohibition for a philanthropy such as the Clinton Foundation, which undeniably does much essential, heroic work around the globe.

But it’s a philanthropy headed by a woman who’s most likely running for president and by her husband and daughter. Their requests and their gratitude cannot be separated entirely from politics. There’s inevitable overlap and blending.

As The Washington Post wrote, the foundation “has given contributors entree, outside the traditional political arena, to a possible president. Foreign donors and countries that are likely to have interests before a potential Clinton administration — and yet are ineligible to give to U.S. political campaigns — have affirmed their support for the family’s work through the charitable giving.”

And this isn’t some minor wrinkle of the foundation’s structure and workings. “A third of foundation donors who have given more than $1 million are foreign governments or other entities based outside the United States, and foreign donors make up more than half of those who have given more than $5 million,” according to The Post’s analysis.

That analysis also showed that “donations from the financial services sector” represented the “largest share of corporate donors.” In other words, the foundation is cozy with Wall Street, which has also funneled Clinton some of her enormous speaking fees.

The Journal noted that “at least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation.”

A few prominent Democrats with whom I spoke were spooked, not because they believed that Clinton would feel a pressing need to repay these kindnesses, but because the eventual Republican nominee had just been handed a potent weapon against her.

And in the income-inequality era, how does a candidate crowned with this many dollar signs put herself forward persuasively as a woman of the people and a champion of the underdog?

The answer — and her salvation — may be that we’ve all become so accustomed to the tide of money washing through politics that we just assume all candidates to be equally (and thoroughly) wet. We give in. And we stop acknowledging frequently or urgently enough that American elections, which should be contests of ideas and character, are as much (if not more) contests of cold, hard cash.

Certainly those of us in the news media are somewhat guilty of this because something that’s no longer new is no longer news.

Sure, we publish stories about the dizzying, obscene heights of spending by major donors, like one written in The New York Times last month by Nicholas Confessore. He noted that the Koch brothers had drawn up a budget of $889 million for the 2016 election cycle.

But we discuss the damage being done to Chris Christie’s presidential dreams by the defection of potential donors without digressing to underscore the perversity of a small circle of people having so much consequence.

We report, as we did in January, on how well or poorly Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz performed when they spoke at a gathering put together by the Kochs in Southern California. But we don’t flag the oddity of these auditions, the chilling bizarreness of the way the road to the White House winds not only through the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary but also through plutocrats’ posh retreats.

An astonishing bounty of the comments and developments that make headlines emanate from the arena of fundraising. We learned that Mitt Romney might enter the 2016 race because he was telling donors as much, and we learned that he had decided otherwise because he was letting donors know. In neither instance did we take sufficient note of that.

We articulate misgivings about how much of Clinton’s or Bush’s thinking may be rooted in the past. But the bigger issue, given the scope of not just their own political histories but also their relatives’, is how heavy a duffel of IOUs each of them would carry into office.

Their prominence is commensurate with their debts. And only so many of those can be forgotten.

Frank Bruni is a columnist for The New York Times.