by T. Scott
November 16, 2007
The office looks like a place where Sam Spade would be comfortable. Cheap, cast-off furniture fights for space with piles of boxes, a bank of file cabinets and stacks upon stacks of reports, file folders and reams of copy paper. Through the office’s thin, paint-peeling walls sift the tinny sounds of music and workmen disassembling exhibits in the interior of the aged Museum Drive building, located a roll down the hill from the ultra-modern Lansing Center. Large florescent fixtures hang from above, no ceiling tiles to hide or soften them. Only a worn-out copy machine and two desktop computers give the infrequent visitor a clue it’s not 1940s San Francisco.
“Welcome to the home of the insurgency,” laughs Rich Robinson, showing the entirety of the space with a half gesture.
Its gumshoe ambiance may stem from a lack of financial resources, but it’s not inappropriate for the work Robinson does there. Executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, Robinson searches through computer and hard-copy records to uncover from whence come the tens of millions of dollars spent by political candidates and their elaborate, oft-hidden financing schemes each Michigan election cycle. In 2006 the amount was a record $192 million (more than $78 million in the governor’s race alone), according to the Network, and Robinson suspects there were millions more he never unearthed.
The fact that it took the Network until July of this year to complete and publicly release its tally of the spending for the 2006 elections — held eight months earlier — underscores the complexity of the task. The high-stakes game of political cat and mouse sends Robinson to television stations and cable systems across the state, through a numbing number of computer screens and anywhere else there’s a paper trail or a whiff of money raised, money spent.
Why the cloak and dagger when candidates are required by state law to report their campaign fundraising and spending? The short answer: they are and they’re not.
“Michigan’s partial system of contribution limits caps the amount a contributor can give to a candidate for public office ($3,400 for governor in 2006). However, there are no limits on contributions to political action committees (PACs) or political parties,” Robinson explains. “The big players in political campaigns know they can easily circumvent candidate contribution limits by giving an unlimited amount to a PAC or party and have the PAC or party committee spend an unlimited amount as an independent expenditure. Unlike federal campaign finance law…there is no prohibition in state law against coordination between an independent spender and candidate committee.”
So what’s the big deal?
“That means that in Michigan state campaigns there’s essentially no disclosure of where all that money comes from. I operate from a premise that people don’t give money for selfless reasons, they’re pushing their interests. And that’s fine, I mean that’s the way the system works. But to be able to do so anonymously is certainly problematic, and I think that if most people understood how this game is being played, they’d see it as problematic, too.”
One of the big concerns for modern democracy, as Robinson sees it, is the secrecy combined with the huge concentration of political money coming from only a few sources. He points out that only 38 individuals and one PAC gave the Michigan Republican Party a total of $3.5 million in the last two-year election cycle. At the same time, three PACs and one individual gave the Michigan Democratic Party $3.5 million. “So you could gather in one room, not even a very large room, 70 percent of the people who financed both political parties,” Robinson says. Also factor in that husband and wife Dick and Betsy DeVos put in more than $35 million of their own money into his run for governor, and brother and sister Jon and Pat Stryker created the largest PAC in Michigan history ($5.5 million) less than three months before the elections in order to finance Democratic candidates.
While conceding there have been notable exceptions, with DeVos at the top of the list, Robinson wields one statistic like a snub-nose .38: over the last four election cycles, the candidates with the most money behind them won 95 percent of the elections.
“Unless we think wealthy individuals and well-financed interest groups deserve to exercise power in a way that is well beyond what most people can imagine, we need limits and accountability in the campaign finance system,” Robinson sums up.
Family Tree
The Network’s parent was the Michigan Prospect, a progressive policy group led by former Democratic State Rep. Lynn Jondahl, perhaps everyone’s most respected liberal. The Network grew out of what the Prospect’s board saw as, Jondahl says, “the need to focus public attention on the potentially corrupting influence of major campaign contribution money on the political process.” Several organizations, including the Michigan chapters of the League of Women Voters and Common Cause plus Michigan Citizen Action, had explored the possibility of campaign finance reforms and concluded that at least two things were needed to bring about significant change: public information and organizational cooperation.Armed with a plan to create the Michigan Campaign Finance Project, the Prospect went to the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, which provides funds primarily in the Great Lakes region for policy initiatives in the environmental, political and education arenas. “Our hope,” Jondahl says, “was to assist the media and the general public in understanding the role of money in politics and also build a network of organizations and individuals interested in exploring changes to the campaign finance system in Michigan.”
Using its own funds, Michigan Prospect began the project and hired Johnston Mitchell as director. Money from the Joyce Foundation was then used to expand the effort. In June 1998, 18 organizations were represented at the first “campaign finance network” meeting in Brighton, Jondahl said. The groups agreed to survey general election candidates for the Michigan House and Senate, and candidates were asked to identify their positions on the current campaign finance system and approaches to reform. The groups also surveyed individuals and organizations that were unable to attend the meeting.
The project teamed up with the Michigan Press Association and Michigan State University’s School of Journalism to hold reporter workshops on tracking the money in political campaigns. In addition, the League of Women Voters conducted a statewide interactive session that connected East Lansing and Traverse City for a lively discussion of money in politics.
“One of the key needs we kept confronting was the lack of good information on what actually was happening in Michigan campaigns,” Jondahl recalls. “We could readily access better information on campaigns for national office than we could on campaigns for Michigan office.”
To assure that the growing project would be independent of the various founding organizations and their broader agendas, the project was formally established as a separate nonprofit organization called the Michigan Campaign Finance Network. That took place in 2001, and Robinson became executive director. Its board members include nonpartisans as well as those clearly identified as Democrats or Republicans. “We believe this assures us and the public of the Network’s credibility,” says Jondahl. Or in Robinson’s words, it was spun off to allow it to function “as an equal opportunity critic.”
“I try scrupulously to be that and generally don’t have any trouble doing that,” Robinson adds. “I mean, you have $40 million [in campaign funds] coming from essentially two people, on both sides, so now it’s all distilling down to ‘my billionaire can whip your billionaire.’ That's not democracy. That's mutually assured destruction of democracy.”
Funding for the Network’s approximately $125,000 annual budget comes primarily from a $100,000 grant from the Joyce Foundation, according to Robinson. Barbara Moorhouse provides research and writing assistance and is the only other employee.
The Network’s independence and aggressiveness have enabled it to, in many regards, eclipse the “good government” organizations that helped create it. The Network has grabbed a great deal of “ink” and become a regular source of campaign finance news for political reporters in Lansing and around the state.
Veteran Capitol reporters give Robinson high marks for being a credible source with a targeted focus and an ample supply of well-researched facts and figures. The reality in today’s threadbare newsrooms is that few reporters would ever have time to compile such information on their own.
“They are the go-to folks when it comes to information on campaign finance,” said John Lindstrom, Gongwer News Service editor. “They work very quickly in terms of getting information to the press, and they are generally pretty accessible, so they are effective in terms of being able to work with us. There has been at least one occasion where they were so fast in getting things out that they made a mistake. So we do want to check their stuff. But frankly, they are so geared towards their area that they can put information together faster than most of us can when we are trying to track down a dozen and one things on top of campaign finance.”
Issue Advertising
Some of Robinson’s toughest detective work involves expenditures on issue advertisements, which he characterizes as “the convenient fiction of Michigan political campaigns” and “a campaign finance black hole.” These types of ads enable donors to get around prohibitions against bringing corporate or union treasury funds into a campaign, because there are no such restrictions for issue ad campaigns. Also absent are requirements for reporting spending and disclosing contributions.The Network reported that more than $20 million was spent on television issue ads alone in 2006, with “roughly 90 percent of that amount dedicated to the suitability or unsuitability of the gubernatorial candidates.” That was more than all spending in the 1998 Michigan governor’s race, meaning, in Robinson’s words, “you have the equivalent of that entire election being spent ‘off the books’ in 2006.”
On top of issue ads is the proliferation of 501(c)(4) committees, which are established as nonprofit advocacy organizations by an increasing number of elected officials. Their activity is nearly impossible to track, Robinson explains, because while they are required by the Internal Revenue Service to file a tax return, they are not required to disclose their existence in any way that would lead the public to know who’s funding them or what the money is buying.
“I think they’re set up as vehicles to receive corporate and union treasury funds that a candidate, committee or a PAC can’t take,” said Robinson. “So it’s kind of a ‘no nickel left behind’ situation.”
Robinson relishes a rare victory on that front several years ago when he read a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal in which the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce bragged about the money that organization had funneled into the 2000 judicial races in a handful of states, including Michigan. “He revealed that it was Wal-Mart and Home Depot and Daimler-Chrysler who were each putting a million dollars into this thing,” said Robinson. “And we only found out because here was somebody who was vain and wanted to make a statement about how much swag he had.”
The irony of that rare disclosure, Robinson says, is that the story appeared on September 11, 2001, and was quickly drowned out by the tragedies of that day.
The “c4s” are in addition to the expansion in number and size of “leadership PACs” created by the legislative caucuses and individual lawmakers. In the 2006 election cycle, elected officials had a total of 92 leadership PACs that collectively raised $8.3 million, according to the Network. Many officials create multiple PACs so that each PAC can contribute the maximum to a campaign, effectively thwarting contribution limits in that race.
The pursuit of campaign funds is relentless, Robinson says, pointing to new figures that show fundraising so far this year by Governor Jennifer Granholm, House Speaker Andy Dillon and Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop is far outpacing the leaders’ intake during the same period two years ago. While the leaders were demonstrating an inability to solve the state’s financial problems and avoid a government shutdown (albeit brief) on October 1, they showed no such lack of prowess in preparing for the 2008 elections.
Social Justice
There’s no mistaking Robinson for Humphrey Bogart’s Spade; he’s more comfortable with policy wonks than pugilists. The road to his current job, however, is worth a movie in itself, leading as it did from his native Upper Peninsula to Lansing by way of Ann Arbor, the Philippines, Ann Arbor again, Montana, the sinking South Pacific island of Tuvalu, Washington, D.C., Flint and Saginaw, to name a few of the key stops.He grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, where his dad was “a good, solid Republican” and the bookkeeper for the International Bridge. His mother took care of the house and family — including Rich and his older brother. Robinson spent summers as a merchant seaman while attending the University of Michigan. No one in his family was involved in politics, he says, but his personal political values were being shaped by “the egalitarian simplicity” of the community, something he has since discussed with former high school classmate Kim Wilcox, now provost at Michigan State University.
“Nobody had any money, so there was no such thing as class structure in our world, which was really quite liberating,” Robinson said.
He was engulfed in patriotism growing up. The Soo still had a World War I drum and bugle corps, so Memorial Day parades were a big deal. “One year I remember George Romney walking over the Ashmun Street Bridge, and my dad said, ‘go over and shake his hand because he might be the president some day.’ And I did. Years later when I met Gov. Romney he got a smile out of that story.”
American society came unglued by Vietnam, assassinations, the civil rights movement and violent protests during Robinson’s formative years. He was developing a strong sense of social justice, and he saw the breakdown of the old order in heroic terms.
“I went from a being a young kid who thought JFK was heroic, to thinking that the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were heroic, even though I can only remember four African-American classmates the whole time I was in K–12. When Dr. King spoke out against the immorality of the Vietnam war he became even more heroic to me. And Muhammad Ali seemed heroic to me. I was a sports-crazed kid and it resonated with me when the world’s greatest athlete took a lonely and domestically unpopular stand for peace. Eventually, all those individuals were exposed as mere mortals who had done heroic things, but I still believe that principled dissent
is heroic.”He graduated from U of M with a degree in natural resources and promptly signed up for the Peace Corps, aware that President Kennedy had announced the Corps on the steps of the Michigan Union. He spent three years in the Philippines, where, he says, he learned “first-hand that it is acquired wisdom to understand a different culture. And much like I never understood English very well until I learned a different language, I never understood my own culture quite so well as I did once I came to know a different culture. I think one of the shortcomings of the American outlook is that we believe anything that is not American is an inferior alternative.”
A husband and wife team, John and Liz Abernethy, served as the Peace Corps’ country directors. John had been a legislative assistant to Governor G. Mennen Williams and served as a mentor of sorts for Robinson. “He was just a thoughtful and really pretty selfless human being,” Robinson recalls, pausing at an emotional memory.
He returned to Ann Arbor for grad school, earning a master’s degree in Asian Studies and Public Policy (he and former congressman/state senator Joe Schwarz converse in Indonesian when together in Lansing). Hoping to find work in international relations, Robinson moved to D.C. and ended up working with Abernethy on a United Mine Workers presidential election.
After that he went west with his then-wife, a health educator who took a job with the Indian Health Service on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana. They next left for the South Pacific, where they worked briefly on the island nation of Tuvalu for the nonprofit Save the Children. (Those islands are currently “sinking,” victims of global warming’s rising seas.) Expecting their first child, the couple returned to Michigan, and Robinson found work at United Way in Flint, then the City of Saginaw in 1985.
In Saginaw he became “the instant expert” on the city-owned Civic Center and ended up running the facility for three years. He and his wife had two children by then, and Rich ended up quitting in 1990 because he was almost never home during the Center’s indoor entertainment season from January to March. He became a consultant for a while and wrote the city’s budget document, then landed a job with an innovative program that Congressman Bob Traxler had earmarked for his district.
Called CIESIN (Center for International Earth Science Information Network), it was part of NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth and focused on human activity around the world that was driving climate change — a program ahead of its time. Later, seeking greater collaboration with academic experts, CIESIN moved from its headquarters at Saginaw Valley State University and moved it to Columbia University in New York.
By then Robinson was a joint custodial parent of two children, and he chose not to head east with CIESIN. Robinson knew House Democratic leader Mike Hanley from Hanley’s days on the Saginaw City Council, and he landed employment on the House Democratic communications staff. Hanley was soon term limited out of office and returned home. Robinson was selected for the Campaign Finance Network Post in 2001, taking over from Mitchell Johnston, who had helped get it started.
“It has been an odyssey, but I enjoyed all of it,” Robinson says, looking back. “The common thread throughout all of this is that I have always worked, in some sense, for the public interest or the public purpose. I’ve really never had much interest in doing anything other than that.”
Reforms
Robinson believes that all the government bashing by politicians from Ronald Reagan to the present has created greater distrust of government and rendered it less able to function effectively. But he doesn’t flinch when asked if his work isn’t unwittingly adding to the mistrust by exposing the tricks of campaign financing.“But this is not about trying to scare people or make people cynical. It’s saying there’s a problem, but we can understand this problem and we can fix it if we have the political will. The problem is that those involved in this system quickly become acculturated to the fact that this is the way it is and, I think, lose a vision that it can be different. When I look at these leadership PACs of the speaker, the majority leader and the governor — all just growing almost exponentially — is that an indicator of a thriving democracy? I don’t think so.”
Not surprisingly, the Network goes beyond reporting by recommending specific reform. It calls for firm limits on contributions to PACS and political parties, greater disclosure of spending before elections, more frequent reporting, a “millionaire amendment” to help those running against “self-funded” candidates, and a system of voluntary public funding for Michigan Supreme Court races. The full agenda goes farther still, covering such related issues as lobbying, ethics, term limits, redistricting, election administration, judicial independence and enforcement of election laws.
Robinson rejects the argument that political contributions can’t be regulated any more than speech can. “One of the old saws that just grates on me is the idea that money equals speech. Justice John Paul Stevens answered that very eloquently: ‘Money is not speech, money is property.’ And in this context it’s an investment that is seeking a return on investment.”
“It all boils down every time to the need for limits and accountability. It’s really very simple, and if there was a commitment to limits and accountability we would have very little problem about money and politics. But the fact that there are not limits and accountability really distorts democracy. People who don’t have the capacity to give money are left with a sense of hopelessness, that ‘I’m irrelevant in this process,’ and that’s reflected in reduced voter turnout, lack of civic engagement and a greater distrust of government. That’s a real tragedy. That’s a diminished America.”
Future Expansion
Jondahl says the board is aware that achieving reform is a more difficult and expensive task than collecting and publishing data. “Our concern is that while we provide valuable information and analysis, we have not spent as much time and effort on building the organizational support that will move from education to effective reforms.” To address that concern, he said, the Network is working on raising funds to add staff and build the organizational support that’s required.Despite watching candidates and special interests add a seemingly endless supply of munitions to the arms race of campaign financing, and running into literally millions of dollars of dead ends in his sleuthing, Robinson says he’s encouraged by recent developments.
He points to a strong response to a recent program the Network held in Traverse City on Supreme Court elections, “conversations” that are beginning to take place in the legislature, recent federal reforms and the rise of the Internet to significantly increase the number of small contributors in elections.
“To see that kind of active citizenship and engagement is real rewarding,” Robinson says. “Political reform certainly is not for the short-winded. This is America, and this is not a sprint.”
T. Scott is editor and publisher of Domemagazine.com.
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