Categories:About the Center, Congress, Heavy Hitters, Industries, Influence & Lobbying, Issues and Legislation, Leadership PACs, PACs, Politicians & Elections
Tags:Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac
12 Comments
September 18, 2008 1:23 PM | jtedder said:
I also don't understand why directors/officer numbers are not included? From NYT (double checked some at Federal Election Committee http://www.fec.gov/) McCain's contributions ARE higher.
From the Federal Election Committee/NYT
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Directors/Officers/Lobbyists
Contributions
Name McCain Obama
----------------- ------ -------
Geoffrey Boisi $70,100 $0
Alfonse D'Amato $30,800 $0
William Lewis, Jr $0 $4,600
Herbert Allison, Jr $0 $2,300
Brenda Gaines $0 $2,300
Jerome P.
Kenney $2,300 $0
Patrick Swygert $1,000 $1,000
Robert Glauber $0 $1,000
Daniel Mudd $1,000 $0
John Sites $1,000 $0
Louis Freeh $200 $0
Others (29 lobbyists) $63,500 $4,800
-------------------- ---------- -------
Total $169,900 $16,000
hmmm...anyone have any insight?
thanks
September 17, 2008 12:10 PM | Lindsay Renick Mayer said:
Thanks for taking the time to respond to this blog item. For a number of reasons, CRP's methodology re: contributions associated with corporations does not include money from the board of directors or lobbyists. We code only employees of the companies receiving a paycheck. Members of the board of directors could be on the boards of multiple companies, so instead of adding their contributions to all of the companies on which boards they sit, their contributions are lumped in with their actual employer's contributions. As for lobbyists who are "hired guns," their contributions would fall under the name of the lobbying firm for which they work, since, similar to directors, lobbyists usually represent multiple clients. In-house lobbyists for a company would be included in the company's totals, however, since the company is their sole employer.
September 16, 2008 10:27 PM | olmsted said:
Figured out why the data doesn't match.
The person who compiled this data apparently didn't search the FEC site for the individual donors' names, and probably simply did blanket searches for "Freddie" and "Fannie".
If you search the FEC for "Geoffrey T. Boisi", a Director of Freddie Mac, you will see exactly where the NYT got their data. In fact, Boisi has contributed $72,400 to McCain since 2007.
Yet this data is conveniently omitted from the above.
September 16, 2008 8:53 PM | olmsted said:
This data is completely bull.
According to the New York Times, John McCain received $70,100 from Geoffrey T. Boisi, Director of Freddie Mac. Yet this contribution is not included in this data. There are a further $90,000 of contributions to John McCain in the NYT data, also omitted from this list.
http://graphics8. nytimes. com/images/2008/09/10/us/politics/10fannie. graphic. jpg
September 16, 2008 1:47 PM | Stevens said:
Total Contributions: $4,844,572
Total by PACs: $3,017,797 (62% of total)
Total by Individuals: $1,826,775 (38% of total)
Total Contributions by Party
(Percentiles are relative to total contributions to specific party divided by total contributions)
Democrats: $2,770,352 (57%)
Republicans: $2,045,720 (42%)
Independents: $28,500 (1%)
PAC Contributions by Party
(Percentiles are relative to total contributions done by PACs to specific party divided by total contributions done by PACS)
Democrats: $1,547,249 (51%)
Republicans: $1,458,798 (48%)
Independents: $11,750 (less than 1%)
Individual Contributions by Party
(Percentiles are relative to total contributions done by individuals to specific party divided by total contributions done by individuals)
Democrats: $1,223,103 (67%)
Republicans: $586,922 (32%)
Independents: $16,750 (1%)
Total Contributions to Democrats
(Percentiles are relative to total contributions to Democrats by PAC or individuals divided by total contributions done to Democrats)
PACs: $1,547,249 (56%)
Individuals: $1,223,103 (44%)
Total Contributions to Republicans
(Percentiles are relative to total contributions to Republicans by PAC or Individuals divided by total contributions done to Republicans)
PACs: $1,458,798 (71%)
Individuals: $586,922 (29%)
Total Contributions to Independents
(Percentiles are relative to total contributions to Independents by PAC or Individuals divided by total contributions done to Independents)
PACs: $11,750 (41%)
Individuals: $16,750 (59%)
September 15, 2008 3:21 PM | Zaggs said:
Using the obama standard its legit to question how much money he's gotten from Fred and Fannie. Keep in mind he's accused the McCain campaign of being fueled by PAC and lobbyist contributions despite the fact those account for less then 2% of McCain's total campaign intake.
Jesse, McCain may have the lobbyists of Fannie and Fred but the people who actually ran the company are on the other side. Fannie and Fred didn't get here because they spent too much on lobbying. They got here because the people who were running the two did a very poor job.
To put another way if Fannie and Fred were succeeding beyond the wildest dreams of Wall Street would anyone care about the lobbyists?
September 13, 2008 3:10 PM | AnnJo said:
If the point that Charles II makes is that we shouldn't give much weight to the high numbers for Obama, Clinton and Kerry, because each has run for President, what are we to make of the low number for McCain, who has run for President twice?
McCain has also been in Congress for the entire 18.5-year period covered, versus only 3.5 years for Obama.
September 12, 2008 10:36 PM | Jesse said:
for example, this list shows McCain receiving almost nothing. But read this...
http://dyn. politico. com/printstory. cfm?uuid=28F13661-3048-5C12-000140B077704AAA
September 12, 2008 10:22 PM | Jesse said:
Typically a corporation has a PAC, and it is funded by corporate funds AND individual employee contributions.
Employees have the option to let the company decide how to disburse the money, or can "earmark" the money to their preferred candidates.
Officers, Executives, and managers have varying degrees of pressure to cough up money. But the lower you are, the more latitude you have to earmark.
I would question the validity of the inclusion of the individual contributions. Individual employees can 'earmark' their contributions to their own candidate choices.
So there should be a correlation in the individual amounts between candidates who were successful in getting a lot of private individual donations and individual earmarks.
Look more to the PAC column and keep in mind the duration of the time period, but this is chump change compared to their overall lobbying expenditures.
September 12, 2008 8:25 AM | matttclark said:
While the data goes back to 1989, it would be very helpful if you were to also add the year the member received their first donation. some of these folks have been since '89 but quite a few have not.
September 12, 2008 8:25 AM | matttclark said:
While the data goes back to 1989, it would be very helpful if you were to also add the year the member received their first donation. some of these folks have been since '89 but quite a few have not.
September 11, 2008 6:14 PM | Charles II said:
It would be much more helpful to see the totals as a percent of campaign contributions. As I pointed out on your earlier report, a dollar is much less likely to influence a legislator who has contributions of a million dollars than a legislator who has contributions of 100K.
This is especially telling with anyone who has run for president. Barack Obama has received contributions of over $400M. Against that, any contributions he received from Fannie and Freddie is tiny. You have three major presidential candidates (Obama, Clinton, and Kerry) among your top 20. All of them are Democrats. If you were to look at the rankings by percent of funds raised, you would find a very different picture of which individuals are being influenced-- though doubtless, overall, the attempt to influence legislators is bipartisan.
