Bob Etheridge, incumbent and veteran congressman for the 2nd District in North Carolina, might well claim he's going to be blindsided by the right wing in an upcoming series of television ads that will essentially attack him as a big spender who cares nothing for the future of America's children. It's a preposterous accusation, especially considering that Etheridge is a former state superintendent of public instruction.
The attackers, or sponsors, are those who run some outfit called Americans for Job Security. It's one of a multitude of groups doing political business these days as professional gunslingers for big business interests that essentially oppose regulation and common-sense accountability rules protecting American taxpayers from free-wheeling greed exercised in the name of free enterprise. (The excesses of which can be seen in the context of a little something called the Great Recession.)
And thanks to inadequate rules of disclosure, the public has no way of knowing who or what is financing these big money campaigns. (In Etheridge's case, the spending figure is $800,000 as reported in The N&O's Under the Dome.) That's where the blindsiding comes in. The name of this group, and others, is essentially like the storefront on a movie set. It's for show, and there's no telling who's really standing behind it.
Names, please
Thanks to an unfortunate Supreme Court ruling that opened the floodgates for corporate money flowing directly to political causes, and to the anonymity that is provided donors to groups such as this one, the public is denied a very important piece of information: what special interests are behinds these types of ads? That would be informative, because it would allow people to know all the players in a given political contest.
Instead, those who want to fire away at a candidate can hide without the other side being able to go seek. An Etheridge spokesperson, however, did take the gloves off in response, calling the sponsoring group a "shadowy front group funded by big corporate special interests and run by partisan hacks doing the dirty work for their candidates." Those are the words of Mike Davis. Wonder why he sugarcoated it?
It must be said, as evidenced by some early ads attacking incumbent Republican Sen. Richard Burr, that this phenomenon cuts both ways. Unions and other groups typically aligned with Democratic candidates will raise big money and sponsor these same kinds of ads.
And they're not helpful to a public that desires forthright facts with regard to candidates. These types of virtually anonymous ads should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, regardless of the direction they come from.
Plenty of salt
Congress has considered requiring full disclosure of sponsors and financing in the public's interest; Republicans have stood against it. Given that such action wouldn't put further limits on contributions, wouldn't stop the ads, wouldn't do anything to curtail this free speech (that is far from free), what's the problem?
Likely it's that if people were to know that, for example, insurance companies were funding attack ads on those who supported health care reform, they might not take the ads as seriously. And what the people don't know won't hurt the candidates the ads are supposed to support. Or perhaps the GOP fears that if the donors behind these groups were to be disclosed, they might not be as inclined to risk some negative exposure and thus might not kick in for candidates.
The best rule of thumb for an already skeptical public might be: Whenever an ad appears with some virtuous name as the sponsor but without further information, change the channel.
