How the Money Rolls In to Dole, Gramm Camps

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas are the undisputed kings of the money-raising game among the Republican presidential aspirants, both having raked in more than $20 million apiece to fuel their candidacies.

But a detailed Times analysis of their political fund-raising efforts over the last 15 years, for previous political campaigns and causes as well as their presidential bids, reveals important differences in the sources of their financial support.

Gramm, for example, has been the largest single recipient in Congress of money from the National Rifle Assn. In return, the NRA has had no more loyal friend on Capitol Hill than Gramm, who has either introduced or backed the group’s position on 18 gun-related measures in the last decade.

Texas real estate and energy interests also have been among the most important backers of Gramm throughout his political career and have formed the financial foundation of his 1996 presidential campaign. Three of every four dollars he has raised since the early 1980s have come from within Texas.

Dole, whose presidential campaign is the most well-heeled among the GOP candidates, has enjoyed a much broader base of financial support than Gramm, as befits a leading national political figure over the last two decades.

Indeed, by contrast with Gramm, four of every five dollars Dole has raised over the last 15 years, for his presidential and Senate campaigns as well as his political action committee, have come from outside Kansas. One of his most reliable, and generous, contributors has been the Gallo winemaking family of Modesto, Calif.

Along with the gun lobby and Texas real estate and energy interests, the health care lobby has rewarded Gramm handsomely for his past support of legislation benefiting doctors, hospitals and drug companies and his central role in helping to scuttle President Clinton’s health care plan in 1994.

Physicians are the largest group of individual contributors to Gramm’s congressional and presidential campaigns, donating nearly $800,000 through mid-1995. The American Medical Assn. has given $144,500 over the years.

Much of the money from doctors, health maintenance organizations, pharmaceutical companies, nursing homes and hospitals flowed in after Gramm vowed that “the Clinton health care bill is going to pass over my cold, dead political body.”

But Gramm has been courting donations from the medical lobby from the very beginning of his political career, in 1976 when he challenged then-Sen. Lloyd Bentsen in the Democratic primary. Gramm paid thousands of dollars to buy a list of all the physicians in Texas and has maintained close ties with them ever since.

Dole, with many years of service on the Senate Agriculture Committee, has benefited from consistent contributions from the food and agriculture sectors. But he has raised twice as much money over the last 15 years from banking, finance and real estate interests, reflecting his service, and former chairmanship, on the Senate Finance Committee.

His largest group of individual donors is bankers, brokers and investors, who collectively have given him more than $540,000, mostly in $1,000 increments, since 1980. Real estate agents and developers are the second-largest group, with $341,000 in contributions.

Those figures, however, do not include huge corporate and individual contributions to Dole’s Better America Foundation, a political think tank that was exempt from taxes, campaign-finance disclosure laws and contribution limits.

Dole used the fund to raise more than $4.3 million in 1993 and 1994, but he shut it down last spring amid controversy over its then-secret donor list and the purposes to which the money was put. He also disclosed the names of donors and how much they gave.

The 86 donors to the foundation included some of the nation’s biggest names in corporate finance and about 19 individuals who gave $100,000 or more, including New York billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, Denver developer Philip F. Anschutz and New York investor Theodore J. Forstmann.

Lodwrick M. Cook, chairman of Los Angeles-based Arco, Dwayne Andreas, chairman of agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland Co., and Kent Kresa, chairman of Northrop Grumman Corp., each gave $50,000 to Better America.

The Gallos, meanwhile, both through their corporate political action committee and as individuals, have given nearly $250,000 to Dole’s various campaigns since 1980. Additionally, Ernest Gallo, who with his late brother, Julio, developed E&J; Gallo Winery into a multimillion-dollar business, also contributed $50,000 to Dole’s tax-exempt foundation.

The Gallo-Dole relationship clearly has been profitable for both. In the early 1990s, Dole took the company’s side in a fight with the Treasury Department over champagne labeling, which Gallo eventually won.

Then-Senate Minority Leader Dole also supported a special tax exemption in 1985 that allowed the Gallos to bequeath an estimated $80 million to their grandchildren without paying a 33% estate tax enacted that year, according to a new book on Dole’s relationship with his major contributors by former aide Stanley Hilton.

Both sides deny any link between the contributions and Dole’s help.

While both Gramm and Dole have shown their prowess at raising money, Dole enters the crucial early 1996 primaries in much better financial shape than Gramm, who ended 1995 with barely $500,000 in ready cash despite having amassed nearly $21 million.

Gramm qualified for slightly less than $7 million in federal matching funds, most of which will be provided in early January. Spokesman Gary Koops said this money will put the Texas senator “in pretty good shape going into the heavy campaign period.” He also said Gramm anticipates going back to many of his 90,000 contributors for additional donations early in 1996.

Dole raised $24.8 million in 1995 for his presidential campaign and ended the year with $4.5 million cash and only $400,000 in debts. His campaign received 279,000 contributions. He is eligible for $10.2 million in federal matching funds.

“We think our financial advantage is very strong going into the stretch run of the campaign,” said Dole spokesman Nelson Warfield. “The high level of financial support, particularly among small donors, puts to rest the idea that there is a lack of enthusiasm for the Dole campaign.”

Among the other Republican presidential contenders, conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan raised $6.5 million, including $2.3 million in the October-December period. But Buchanan spent virtually all of it, leaving less than $200,000 on hand at year’s end, according to treasurer Scott McKenzie.

Still, McKenzie said that with an anticipated $4 million in federal matching funds and continuing receipts from fund-raising appeals, Buchanan would have more than $5 million in the critical first two months of 1996.

“We’ll be competitive with everyone out there,” he said. “Our operation is leaner, so it doesn’t cost us as much to run this machine as it does the others.”

Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander likewise enters the election year with essentially empty pockets--$500,000 in cash but $1.5 million in debt because of borrowing for advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to spokesman Mark Merritt.

Alexander raised slightly more than $10 million in 1995, including $1.5 million in the last three months of the year. Merritt said that the campaign expects $3.5 million in matching funds to pay for early primary operations.

Year-end figures for Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, Rep. Robert K. Dornan of Garden Grove and former State Department official Alan Keyes were not available. They must be reported to the Federal Election Commission by mid-January.

Two independently wealthy Republican candidates, publishing magnate Steve Forbes and industrialist Morry Taylor, are spending their own money and thus are exempt from FEC disclosure rules.

Forbes has said that he is willing to spend $25 million in his quest for the nomination, while Taylor is willing to invest as much as $15 million. Neither would disclose exactly how much he has spent so far.

Clinton, the Democrat all these Republicans are hoping to displace, didn’t start raising money until June but since then has collected most of the $27 million maximum allowed for the primary season. As a result, he is already disbanding his fund-raising operation, reelection officials said.

Clinton’s finance chairman, Terence R. McAuliffe, said that the reelection campaign will qualify for $13 million in matching funds on Jan. 1. McAuliffe added that the campaign plans to raise $2.2 million by direct mail in the first part of 1996, but that most of the finance committee staff members have been moved to other jobs on the reelection committee or the Democratic National Committee.

Starting with a series of big-donor events in June, the Clinton campaign raised an average of more than $125,000 a day for the rest of the year. Tapping both wealthy, $1,000-a-head donors and tens of thousands of smaller contributors, Clinton was able to amass a war chest that scared away potential Democratic challengers.

He enters 1996 with his political flanks protected and as much as $15 million in the bank--more than enough to mount an aggressive, issue-driven, above-the-fray advertising campaign through the winter as his GOP challengers slug it out among themselves.

Clinton’s fund-raising is “just off the charts,” said Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research group that is preparing a comprehensive study of 1995 political money-raising.

“The amounts they’ve raised and the fact that they started running ads last July--a full year before the convention--are just stunning,” Lewis said.

Times researcher Murielle Gamache contributed to this story.