Friday, September 21, 2007

FRED THOMPSON, JOHN MCCAIN, MITT ROMNEY

Guys, I'm Not Sure Any of You Have Ground To Throw Stones on McCain-Feingold

There's a fight brewing among three of the big Republican presidential campaigns today.

The Romney campaign is showcasing a TownHall piece on "McCain-Feingold-Thompson" campaign finance reform.

One of the campaigns in that trio, and it ain't Feingold, responds by pointing to this Corner post by Ramesh and writing, "don’t let Romney fool the people at the NRA convention." The Corner post notes:

Romney, it turns out, has—surprise, surprise—been on both sides of campaign-finance reform. In his 1994 race, Romney came out for banning political action committees, limiting spending on federal races (something the Supreme Court has not allowed), and opposed allowing larger contributions. All told, those positions place him to the left of McCain-Feingold, which doubled the allowable size of individual donations to candidates. In his 2002 race, he took the position that campaign contributions should be taxed at a 10 percent race, with the proceeds going to public funding of all campaigns.

Rudy Giuliani came out for McCain-Feingold in 2000, saying that he agreed with McCain. He has bragged about his role in inspiring campaign-finance reform in New York City. He wanted to ban soft money and criticized the state's contribution limits for being too generous.

So, the score so far - Thompson cosponsored McCain-Feingold, Romney backed a lot of the provisions in McCain-Feingold and more, and McCain named McCain-Feingold. The first two talk now about how much they don't like much of McCain-Feingold, and Romney pledges he would ask Congress to repeal it.

Rudy hasn't gotten mentioned in this, because when it comes to winning over the NRA crowd, McCain-Feingold is the least of his problems.

09/21 01:09 PMShare