No Audit for Obama?

By BJ

This story tugs at the old sense of fairness.

The Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

Now, for obvious reasons, the government should exercise its oversight capability on anything the taxpayers are funding, and since McCain’s campaign was taxpayer-funded, he has to bite the bullet on this one.  I don’t know if such an audit will finally get to the bottom of complaints about his potential misuse of public financing to secure a loan during the primaries, but at least all those folks getting worked up about Sarah Palin’s wardrobe should get an answer or two.

But for the Obama campaign to sidestep this strikes me as unfair, and to some extent unwise.  The right has already been twisting itself into knots over how Obama was able to raise such large sums of money, and will use this lack of an audit to confirm in their own minds that the stories they’ve spun for themselves are therefore true.

While I have little faith that an audit with its pesky “facts” will do anything to change their minds, since such things will always produce findings that are unflattering to the audited, it would at the very least put to rest any questions about bias for those of us not in the non-persuadable category.

And quite frankly, we’ve just spent the last eight years bitching about a White House occupant whose fetish for secrecy was more than “We the People” should allow from any public servant.  If Obama really wants to show us all a new era of open and accountable government, he can start by opening his campaign books to an independent review.  Fair is fair, and if I were one of the 3.1 million people who donated money to the campaign, I would very much like to know that there was some kind of independent oversight in place to provide assurance that the money was accounted for properly.

In the meantime, as Alan Stewart Carl suggests, maybe John McCain can rewrite his election finance laws so that the billion-dollar industry of electing the US President will be assured of seeing the auditor’s flashlight.