Who Owns Your Candidate? Clinton, Obama & Edwards

by seanarama
Wed Jan 02, 2008 at 11:05:09 AM PST

If lobbyists give a politician enough money, they think they own that politician. And they’re probably right.

Let’s see who’s giving what to who ... and who "owns" which candidates.

After all, if you give a candidate $2,300, and convince 100 of your friends/co-workers/underlings to give him $2,300, that’s $232,300. You might expect significant favors when it comes time to make the next round of laws.

I’m going to show you charts from Opensecrets.org which shows contributions to candidates from selected industries. This gives us an idea which industries might expect favors if certain candidates get elected. One caveat: Corporations only give money if they think it’s going to do them any good. So don’t think the fact that Mike Huckabee gets only a few bucks means he’s a "clean" candidate. It’s just the big corporations think he has little chance of winning.

Also, there are no 100% clean candidates. This isn’t a purity test. It’s a gauge of potential political influence.

BANKS

The banks are in a world of hurt, with bad mortgages on one side and a liquidity crisis (actually a solvency crisis, but that’s a topic for another diary) on the other side. The credit crunch alone – not including all those bad mortgages – could cost the big banks about $250 billion.

The banks will be looking for taxpayers to bail them out. Who are the candidates most likely to do that?



Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are way, way ahead of the pack on this. The big banks might be right in thinking they’ve bought some serious leverage with these two. John Edwards only comes in eighth. He’s even behind Bill Richardson.

Continued . . .