Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

Well, that's depressing. Matt Brown was probably my favorite Senate candidate this cycle, and now we can discuss his candidacy in the past tense. I really liked the guy, so I'm pretty disappointed, but there are other great candidates who haven't sat down for coffee for an hour with me, so here's hoping Sheldon Whitehouse wins this Senate seat in November.

I think there are a couple other issues to address here, the first being that I am campaign poison. Many of you will recall that I've worked on three campaigns, none of which came close to winning, and now the 2006 campaign in which I've gotten the most involved (though not much, really) is the first serious Senate campaign of the cycle to withdraw. Awesome. Go Ned Lamont!

My other problem is that the way Brown dropped out is really depressing, even more so than losing my favorite candidate. He got ensnared in a campaign finance scandal: the Hawaii, Massachusetts and Maine Democratic Parties all donated to his campaign, then a couple days later a lot of his maxed-out contributors donated almost the same amount to those state parties. This looks like a finance-limits end run, in which Brown's donors could contribute above the federal limit in money that would all go to Brown eventually. (That's illegal.)

Brown said those state parties were just helping him out on their own volition, and he asked his supporters to donate to them to be nice back. That could be, but the trouble is, there's really no reason for out-of-state parties (especially hawaii) to be getting involved in an RI Senate primary. Like what does the Hawaii Democratic Party care whether it's Brown or Whitehouse?

What complicates this is that there's no bright-line rule, and politicians do similar stuff all the time. Imagine, if you will, Senate candidates challenging Republican incumbents in Rhode Island and Connecticut the same year. The two candidates could host fundraisers for each other, giving each candidate the benefit of the other's donor pool. Sure, you can't do an exact tit-for-tat, but it looks like the Matt Brown situation is somewhere in the middle. The FEC did investigate, but as far as I know they haven't reached any conclusions.

I'm disappointed for two reasons. First, I suspect if Brown had apologized and returned the money right away, saying everything he did was legal but he didn't want a hint of impropriety, he would have been more or less okay. So whether it was the people who made this questionable fundraising decision, or the people who told him to stonewall, what wound up happening is my favorite candidate wound up dropping out of his race because of staff error. I don't begrudge the people who were working for him (this is a LOT easier to say in retrospect, plus, I certainly made my share of staff error*), but it still sucks. And no, I have no solutions for how candidates can avoid getting tanked by a staff mistake, but I'm still complaining.

The second reason this brings me down is why it happened. Note that Matt Brown wasn't lying about his past, switching his issue positions depending on his audience, making ridiculous policy stands, or even being a bad public speaker. He lost because he was desperate to raise money. That's what really gets me about this. If we had public financing like a whole bunch of other places, where it always works just fine, Matt Brown would have had a fair shot to make his case and, in my opnion, win himself a Senate seat. But we don't have public financing, and candidates for office have to spend at least 40 hours a week fundraising that they could spend learning the issues and talking to voters. As a result, the primary skill for winning elections is fundraising ability, which I guess is a neat trick but not really something I care about in an elected official. I've believed for a long time that public financing would go a long way to clean up our political system, and now our current system has just claimed a true all-star.

OK, one last thing bothers me. I really wanted to know if Matt Brown, with a fair shot, could have won this race. Now we never will.

(*I want to add that I've gone on the record as publicly blaming staff error, without mentioning that it was my own error, even though it wasn't my fault! Campaigns can be rough sometimes.)