Huge spending spree gets underway for campaign 2000
By Ceci Connolly,
The Washington Post
The 2000 presidential race is
developing into a mammoth
spending spree, with Vice President
Gore aiming to raise a record $55
million and two other candidates
considering giving up federal money
so they can spend unlimited sums.
Gore, who has been holding a
series of private dinners with top
fund-raisers, plans to exploit every
available legal loophole to collect far
more money than the basic spending
limits allow. An intimidating war
chest, his strategists assert, will scare
off other Democrats and give him an
early start on attacking the ultimate
GOP nominee.
At the same time, advisers to two
Republicans, Texas Gov. George W.
Bush and Malcolm S. “Steve”
Forbes, say they are weighing
whether to opt out of the system that
gives primary candidates partial
federal funding. That would let them
spend as much as they want in pursuit
of the nomination. “It’s totally out of
control,” said Stan Huckaby, a
Republican accountant who has
advised numerous presidential
campaigns.
The money chase is so
overwhelming that former California
governor Pete Wilson (R) and Sen.
John F. Kerry, D-Mass„ announced
last week they would not run. On
Thursday, the quest for cash quickens
with three candidates, Gore, former
vice president Dan Quayle and
Democrat Bill Bradley, holding
major fund-raising dinners.
Teen suspended,
may be expelled
for note about
teacher
By Brooke A. Masters,
The Washington Post
When the teacher confiscated a
note Anna Kopko was writing to her
good friend during German class, the
Springfield, Va., ninth-grader was a
little worried and stayed after the bell
to apologize.
She had, after all, just finished
writing how unhappy she was about
her latest grade from the teacher,
Gary Sipe: "I have a D. I’m
grounded. ... I want to kill that
(expletive). ... I want to die.” But
Anna, 15, never envisioned how
seriously Sipe and the Fairfax
County public schools would take
her letter. Sipe reported it as a death
threat, and the principal of Lake
Braddock Secondary School
suspended Anna and has
recommended that she be expelled.
“They’re taking it as if I would
actually do something horrible,” the
15-year-old said last week. “It’s
grossly unfair,” said her father,
William Kopko, 40. “They
automatically assumed the worst.”
School officials said privacy laws
prevent them from discussing Anna’s
case, but student threats in general
have taken on new urgency after a
rash of mass shootings by pupils in
Oregon, Arkansas and elsewhere.
“People are more concerned than
they were five or 10 years ago, and
with good reason,” said Fairfax
School Board Vice Chairman Mark
H. Emery. “Teachers have been
attacked. Teachers have been
threatened.”
Gary Marx, senior consultant at
the American Association of School
Administrators, said that schools are
emphasizing prevention these days:
“If something happened (later) and
the school system had done nothing,
what would everyone think of us?
Last year, Fairfax suspended 161
people for threats against school
personnel, and expulsion was
recommended in 25 cases involving
threats to students or staff members,
said school hearing officer Doug
Holmes.
Under the Fairfax schools policy,
threatening to assault a staff member
automatically results in suspension
and may lead to expulsion, but
expulsion is not mandatory, officials
said. The threat does not have to be
made directly to the intended victim,
Holmes said.
“Everybody is pressing the envelope,
spending a lot of time worrying about
money,” said Quayle campaign
chairman Kyle McSlarrow.
Twenty-Five years after Congress
passed a law to restrain the flow of
money into presidential campaigns,
and two years after a campaign widely
condemned for its financial abuses,
the candidates are preparing to open
the floodgates to an unprecedented
amount of unregulated spending.
After investigations by Congress, the
Justice Department and the Federal
Election Commission into 1996 fund
raising practices fizzled, and
campaign reform legislation failed
last year, the strategists for 2000 have
concluded that there is little risk in
pushing the fund-raising boundaries
to new extremes.
When the 1974 act was written,
lawmakers thought they had devised
a foolproof way to shift the emphasis
from dialing for dollars back to
discussing the issues. They offered
candidates a tantalizing deal: live
within strict overall and state-by-state
spending rules in exchange for
millions in taxpayer-provided
“matching funds.” Each party’s
nominee would also receive full
public financing for the general
election campaign. But a combination
of factors coalesced to frustrate those
intentions. The cost of campaigning
has skyrocketed while the maximum
donation has remained at $l,OOO for
individuals, meaning candidates have
to spend more time than ever courting
donors.
The entrance of wealthy, self
financed candidates such as Forbes
Anna has been suspended since
Feb. 17, and her case is being
considered by Holmes and a school
system official, her family said. The
School Board would have to approve
an expulsion. County police
investigated but determined that no
crime was committed, Sgt. Sharon
Smith said. Anna’s parents and their
attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, said
they understand that threats must be
investigated, but they argued that the
school has overreacted.
Active in Girl Scouts and her
church, Anna gets mostly As and Bs
and has never been in any disciplinary
trouble, except for a stint in detention
for being tardy to German class, her
parents said. A psychiatrist hired by
the family wrote after examining her
that “Anna Kopko poses no danger
to herself or anyone else.”
Not only is Anna not dangerous,
the Kopkos argued, the letter itself
does not qualify as a threat. It is an
otherwise typical schoolgirl note
about a boy who likes her and her
fears of being grounded. “It was a
note that vented her feelings,” said
Susan Kopko, 42. "It put me in mind
of some of the things I used to write
to my friends.”
The other part of the note that
involved Sipe referred to a dream. “I
woke up scared because Mr. Sipe was
in my dream. Me and you were
planning a way to kill Mr. Sipe and
he was right there in front of us and
turned around and got really mad,”
Anna wrote.
Sipe declined to comment. He
wrote in a letter to a supervisor later
given to the Kopko family, “I am now
somewhat uncomfortable working in
my classroom, never knowing
whether this student might appear at
my door with a firearm and act out
her desire to kill me.”
Holmes said that the school system
takes seriously any activity that the
intended target finds threatening.
“What constitutes a threat is
something that produces fear in
another person,” he said. Anna said
she is amazed to suddenly find herself
out of school. Until officials raised
the possibility of expulsion, she said,
“the biggest thing I was worried about
was how I was going to survive
German for the rest of the year.”
World and Nation
has other potential candidates
worrying about how to compete
against someone not constrained by
spending limits. And a compressed
primary calendar that will likely
produce nominees by early March
2000 further increases the pressure on
candidates to build up their bank
accounts now. “To be competitive,
you have to have the money up front,”
said Howard Opinsky, a spokesman
for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
The competition for dollars has
become so intense that most
candidates will spend half of 1999
trolling for cash, their strategists said.
McCain plans to attend 25 fund
raisers by the end of March, while
former Reagan administration official
Gary Bauer is busy mining a direct
mail list of 90,000 supporters. House
Budget Committee Chairman John R.
Kasich, R-Ohio, made a pilgrimage
to New York to woo mega fund-raiser
Georgette Mosbacher, while
Elizabeth Hanford Dole is contacting
many friends in her husband’s ready
made donor network.
Even as Bush prepares to announce
the formation of his exploratory
committee, a debate rages inside his
inner circle about whether he should
give up federal funding to attempt to
match the wealthy Forbes dollar-for
dollar. His spokeswoman, Karen
Hughes, said only: “A decision has
not been made yet.” Another top Bush
adviser outlined “significant
advantages” to forgoing matching
funds, but said a final decision would
likely come a number of months into
the campaign.
In the 1996 primaries, Forbes spent
Japan gets
By Mary Jordan,
The Washington Post
TOKYO _ Doctors Sunday night
performed the first legal organ
transplants in Japan from a brain-dead
patient, a milestone for Japanese
medicine and an event that has
transfixed the nation.
Japan stands apart from virtually
every other developed country in its
reluctance to legally recognize brain
death. Until a recent law did just that,
a stopped heart was the legal
definition of death in Japan. That
meant that no heart was available for
transplantation.
To the increasing embarrassment
and anger of many in the medical
community here, critically ill patients
have had to fly to the United States
or other countries for transplant
operations that Japanese doctors have
long had the skills to perform. Doctors
said thousands of patients who lacked
Marine jets
By Alan Sipress,
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON _ The Federal
Aviation Administration said Friday
that it has opened an investigation into
how a pair of U.S. Marine Corps F/
A-18 jets strayed from their flight
pattern Thursday morning, passing
too close to a commuter airplane
approaching Dulles International
Airport.
The FAAsaid the incident occurred
35 miles south of Dulles when the F/
A-18 Hornet fighters, out of Andrews
Air Force Base, left their assigned
holding pattern and came within
nearly a mile of United Express Flight
7618, a turboprop bound from
Raleigh-Durham International Airport
with 16 passengers and three crew
members on board.
FAA spokeswoman Arlene Salac
said a preliminary review attributed
Mystery deepens in
missing persons case
By Eric Bailey,
Los Angeles Times
Authorities were nearly finished
Friday with an an exhaustive search
in the Sierra Nevada mountains for a
Eureka, Calif., woman and two teen
agers missing for 11 days, as the FBI
stepped up its investigation of the
mysterious case.
Searchers discovered nine
abandoned or stolen cars while
combing major roads leading from
Yosemite National Park, but failed to
find the bright red Pontiac Grand Prix
rented by Carole Sund, her daughter
and a friend.
The trio were last believed seen on
$32 million of his own money,
dropping about $4 million in the
lowa caucuses alone, more than
double the legal spending limit. His
early advertising blitz set off a chain
reaction that left the eventual GOP
nominee, Bob Dole, with little money
and plenty of scars.
“You need to be in a position to
respond” to a Forbes attack, said the
Bush adviser. Opting out of the
federal system "puts you on more
even ground with Forbes and his
wallet.” But the decision is not easy.
By one Bush adviser’s estimate, the
governor would need to raise an
additional $l7 million if he chooses
not to take matching funds. And he
would still be limited to raising a
maximum of $l,OOO from
individuals.
“You begin to ask yourself how
many people you can find to give you
$l,OOO each,” said one Republican
strategist. Indeed, while other
candidates have considered not
participating in the matching-fund
system, none has taken that plunge
without a large personal checkbook
to finance his campaign.
“In the past, you heard Ronald
Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s folks
make noise about not taking the
matching funds," said Anthony
Corrado, a campaign finance expert
at Colby College. “But, when push
came to shove, they all took the
money.” Whichever strategy Bush
adopts, Ron Kaufman, a veteran GOP
operative who served in the Bush
White House, said much of the
former president’s f inancial network
is poised to step into action for the
its first organ transplants
the money or strength to travel died
needlessly in recent years because of
the ban
But many Japanese people still
have a strong aversion to donating or
receiving organs. Some believe a
person’s body should be intact for its
journey in the afterlife, while others
feel that if they accept a part of
another person’s body, they are also
accepting part of that person’s soul.
Referring to Sunday night's
operation, Tomoko Abe, spokesman
for a group that opposes transplants,
said that in view of the pressure to
use organs for transplant, “1 have
sincere doubt that doctors did
everything they could to treat the
donor.” But, bowing to growing
public acceptance of organ donation
as well as pressure from patients'
groups and physicians, the parliament
16 months ago passed a controversial
law that allowed transplants from
brain-dead donors.
get too close to Dulles-bound plane
the incident to an error by the fighter
pilots. They had been waiting for
approval from air traffic controllers
to begin maneuvers over Quantico
Marine Corps Base in support of
ground units conducting infantry
training.
In announcing the month-long
investigation. Salac said the FAA was
very concerned that the jets had
violated regulations by coming w ithin
300 feet in altitude and a mile in
horizontal distance from the
commuter plane. At that altitude,
aircraft must remain at least 1,000
feet apart in vertical distance and
three miles horizontally.
The incident marked the fourth
time in two years that aircraft had
violated restrictions for airspace over
Fredericksburg, Va., that is
designated for military operations at
some times and civilian flights at
others. Previous FAA investigations
Feb. 16, the day they were to return
from a visit to Yosemite. Sund, 42,
was accompanied by her 15-year-old
daughter, Julie, and 16-year-old
Silvina Pelosso, a family friend who
was visiting from Argentina.
Nick Rossi, an FBI spokesman,
said a foot search by scores of law
enforcement officers had covered 90
percent of the terrain surrounding
access routes leading from the park.
“The likelihood of an accident in the
immediately vicinity of Yosemite is
decreasing,” Rossi said. But
authorities cautioned that there
remains some possibility the car may
have plunged into a remote canyon
hidden by thick brush or deep snow
Thursday, March 4, 1999 - The Behrend College Beacon - page 7
son. Already, Bush has played host
to more than 75 prominent
contributors at the governor’s
mansion, and his aides boast that
between the governor and his brother,
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), the Bush
team has a list of 122,000 possible
donors.
Gore offers a case study in how to
stay within the system of federal
funding but stretch the legal limits to
the extreme. Over the years,
politicians, with the approval of
regulators at the FEC, have invented
ways to raise money above the strict
federal caps, estimated to be $33.5
million this year. They can collect
more by designating some of it as
intended for fund-raising costs or
legal and accounting expenses. Thus,
Gore’s target is $21.4 million above
the basic spending ceiling.
While the extra cash is supposed
to be used for those "exempt”
expenses and not on direct
campaigning, past campaigns have
found creative ways to use the money.
For example, the former director of
Gore’s political action committee,
Nick Baldick, is on the payroll of
Gore 2000 as a fund-raiser, meaning
that his salary can be paid from those
extra “exempt” dollars even though
he has no experience raising money.
Gore’s advisers believe that raising
$55 million serves a dual benefit,
dissuading potential Democratic
rivals from challenging him for the
nomination and giving him a
financial advantage heading into the
general election. The strategy is
"shut-out politics,” said Fred
Wertheimer, president of Democracy
Sunday night's operation, the first
transplant since the law was passed,
involved a 44-year-old stroke victim
who had signed a donor card. Her
heart was flown to one city for a
gravely ill man and her liver to a
second city for another man, while her
kidneys were being prepared for
others. The case has been so heavily
reported in the media that the donor’s
family threatened at one point to hall
the operations. TV crews filmed the
helicopter carrying the donor’s heart
as it look off from the hospital in
Kochi, the city on the island of
Shikoku where the stroke victim died,
and as it arrived in Osaka, where a
47-year-old patient and a medical
team were waiting.
In Osaka, a special newspaper
edition announced the operation. The
donor's liver was put on a plane and
flown to Nagano, where last year’s
Olympics were held, hut details about
the male recipient were not
found that two of the violations were
attributable to pilot error and two to
errors by air traffic control. Paul
Rinaldi, president of the Air Traffic
Control Association at Dulles, said
military aircraft are “always spilling
out” of the airspace assigned for
operations over Quantico.
A month ago, a military transport
plane out of Andrews barely missed
colliding over Leesburg, Va., with a
Mesa Airlines commuter plane bound
from Long Island, N.Y., to Dulles. An
investigation into that incident is
nearing completion, but the FAA has
already blamed it on poor
coordination among air traffic
controllers. The FAA's examination of
the Thursday incident will have to sort
through differing accounts given by
United Express, the Marine Corps and
the air traffic controllers.
“It was just the quick thinking of
the controllers in the Dulles tower
Yosemite
and won’t be discovered until spring
thaw.
Meanwhile, FBI agents are
expanding efforts to determine if
Sund and the girls might have been
victims of foul play. A wallet insert
containing Sund’s credit cards and
driver’s license was found a week
ago in Modesto, a two-hour drive
from Yosemite. The discovery
prompted concern that they might
have been victims of a carjacking or
other crime.
Rossi said FBI experts on child
abductions were being consulted. In
addition, critical incident response
teams at the bureau’s Washington
headquarters were contacted.
21, which promotes the tightening of
campaign finance laws. “The goal is
to shut out opponents.”
If Gore wins the nomination with
minimal effort and can hoard most of
his money, he will enjoy a huge
strategic advantage over the GOP
nominee, just as President Clinton did
four years ago. In April 1996, the
president’s $l9 million dwarfed
Dole’s $2.1 million bank account,
allowing Clinton to dominate the
airwaves for four months. If the Gore
plan works, he, too, will have several
million dollars squirreled away for the
early summer campaign-before the
two major-party candidates receive
millions in general election financing.
Building on the successful fund
raising model of 1995, Gore has left
nothing to chance. Five weeks after
opening his campaign, Gore’s first
solicitation was mailed to 850,000
people, said campaign manager Craig
Smith. The Gore team, like many
others, relies on a network of
“collectors" to round up donors.
Anyone who collects $50,000 from
other supporters joins the vice
president’s national finance board, a
ceremonial group that entitles
members to attend a handful of private
get-togethers with Gore.
"Fund-raising for a presidential
campaign is as much a grass-roots
organizing effort as it is a finance
effort,” said Smith. “You can have
somebody worth a billion dollars, but
at the end of the day you can only
write a check for $1,000.”
immediately available. A major TV
network, TBS, broadcast a previously
recorded interview with the heart
recipient, blurring the image of his
face and withholding his name for
privacy. In that interview, the man said
the heart was a gift "he could not ask
for” and the “ultimate act of
volunteerism.”
Japan’s only other heart transplant
was performed in 1968. That surgeon
was investigated for murder because,
even though the donor was brain-dead,
the heart was still beating. The legal
action effectively stopped all heart
transplants until Sunday night.
"Finally we have reached this point,”
said Hiroshi Amamiya, a physician
and chairman of a group of doctors in
favor of transplants from brain-dead
donors. “1 hope this is just the first
radar room that averted this from
becoming something catastrophic,”
Rinaldi said. He said the jets, flying
in formation, were on a direct course
to strike the commuter plane and were
20 seconds away when a controller
gave the urgent order for the fighters
to change altitude. But both the
Marine Corps and Atlantic Coast
Airlines, which operates United
Express, reported that the fighters had
been on course to pass behind the
commuter plane.
Sgt. Jeffery Foster, media chief for
the Marine Forces Reserve, said the
fighters never endangered the United
Express plane. He said the jets passed
behind it at low speed as they were
turning to leave their holding pattern
and return to Andrews because of
inclement weather.
Body slam
By Ceci Connolly,
The Washington Post
Things had been going so well for
The Body, until he agreed to appear
on the “Late Show With David
Letterman.” The new governor of
Minnesota, former pro wrestler Jesse
Ventura, speculated on the program
that the streets of St. Paul are so
haphazardly laid out they must have
been designed by a drunken Irishman.
“I think it was those Irish guys. You
know what they like to do,” he told
Letterman as he mimed guzzling a
drink. The St. Paul City Council fired
back Wednesday with a resolution that
said the streets were designed “to keep
wrestlers and other undesirables out.”
The Reform Party governor
apologized Thursday, saying it was his
feeble attempt at humor.