Bush, Dukakis Got Record Big Gifts : Donors of $100,000 Each Able to Exploit Legal Loophole

The Bush and Dukakis presidential campaigns received unexpectedly huge amounts of “soft money” from wealthy contributors, exploiting a legal loophole that enabled each candidate to spend more than twice the $46 million provided in public funds, officials said Friday.

Presenting their first complete financial picture since the Nov. 8 election, the officials disclosed at a conference on campaign finances here that big contributors showered Democrat Michael S. Dukakis with $68 million and Republican President-elect George Bush with $54 million raised outside federal limits.

Under a loophole permitting individual contributors to exceed a $20,000 ceiling if the money is spent by state political parties, 130 Dukakis supporters and 267 Bush backers gave $100,000 apiece. It was the biggest outpouring of megagifts since campaign laws were tightened in 1974 after the offer of ambassadorships to key Republican donors as part of the Watergate scandal.

Calls for Lower Ceiling

Bush’s deputy finance chairman, Fred M. Bush (no relation), called for restricting soft money gifts to $50,000 apiece, but Dukakis campaign treasurer Robert A. Farmer urged only that the contributions be fully disclosed. Currently, Republican and Democratic officials are volunteering limited information to those seeking to identify potential conflicts of interest.

“If you forbid the raising of soft money, people will just find a way to get around it,” Farmer said. He appeared with Fred Bush at a conference of 1988 presidential campaign officials sponsored by the USC-based Citizens’ Research Foundation.

To prevent abuses as he raised funds, Farmer said, he made sure that a deputy was in the room with him when he solicited large donations.

“I didn’t want any misunderstandings,” he said. “If the donor said that he’d like to be an ambassador to an English-speaking country, we would not take the money.”

As a further safeguard, he added, all $100,000 donors were checked out on two computer data bases for possible conflicts of interest.

“We returned four $100,000 checks when we didn’t like what we found,” he said.

At first, Farmer said, people told him that it was “crazy” to go after $100,000 gifts. “But it became fashionable--the place to be,” he said.

Bush, the GOP campaign finance aide, said that big donors had “a raft of motivations,” most of them benign.

“Most people feel the money is going to enhance their idea of where the country ought to go,” he said. “For others, it’s a matter of (pleasing) who asked you or a social motive--you want to go to the fund-raising party.”

Farmer, declaring that Democrats needed to offset the Republicans’ historically superior fund-raising efforts, announced a $50-million soft-money goal at the Democratic National Convention in July. The Bush campaign, which originally sought to raise only $27 million in soft money, scrambled to retaliate, creating a “Team 100” to match the Democrats’ hunt for $100,000 contributors.

Herbert E. Alexander, a campaign finance expert who ran the study conference, estimated that total spending on the 1988 campaigns and national nominating conventions was at least $500 million, compared with an estimated $325 million in public and private funds in 1984.

“That sounds like a lot of money, but it’s really not,” Alexander said, noting that the nation’s largest corporate advertiser, Philip Morris Inc., spent $1.6 billion last year. “If one-third of that amount is being spent to elect a President, it’s really achieving an office on the cheap.”

Alexander suggested that federal spending limits on presidential primary campaigns may need to be raised. Once Super Tuesday primaries were over March 8, Bush and his chief rivals, Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and the Rev. Pat Robertson, each had spent about $20 million toward their $27-million limit.

“Had either Dole or Robertson remained competitive, I don’t know what they would have relied on” in later primaries, he said.

But several aides at the conference said that there would have been a gentleman’s agreement among the campaigns to exceed the spending limits--and face any consequences from the Federal Election Commission later.