Web List of Bush Donors Provokes Intense Interest

The day after Texas Gov. George W. Bush began posting daily lists of his presidential campaign contributors on the Internet, a heavy volume of online traffic clogged the computers running his Web site.

The Republican front-runner also drew criticism from analysts of campaign fund-raising for creating a site packed with information in a format that cannot be sorted or analyzed by computers.

Bush said he decided to identify his financial supporters before the federally required reporting deadline as a voluntary and simple step toward campaign reform--an issue raised in connection with his campaign because of its record-breaking pace of fund-raising.

Nine hundred pages of donations, from $1 to $5,000, are detailed on the site, including a $5 gift from a policeman in Albuquerque and a $5,000 gift from the political action committee of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Overall, Bush reported raising $12 million from July 1 to Aug. 26, bringing his total to a record $49 million and assuring that he will break the $50-million mark before the current Federal Election Commission reporting period ends Sept. 30.

Bush received almost $20,000 from House members, including $1,000 apiece from House GOP Conference Chairman J.C. Watts Jr. (R-Okla.) and Chief Deputy Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). About four dozen state and local officials also contributed to Bush from their campaign accounts.

“What he did is a step in the right direction, but only a small one,” said Don Simon, executive vice president of Common Cause, a citizens’ watchdog group.

“You either provide information in a usable form or you don’t,” Simon said. “He did less than he could have.”

An analyst would have to transfer Bush’s 900-page report manually to a computer program--one transaction at a time--to do a typical campaign money analysis on a subject such as how much cash Bush got from specific industries and sources.

Dwight Morris of the Campaign Study Group dismissed Bush’s postings as an unwieldy “phone book” of donors.

“More information is not necessarily always better, unless it’s in a form that makes it usable,” said Morris, who analyzes campaign contributions for the Los Angeles Times and other news organizations. “It’s almost too much disclosure for people who are interested in analyzing the information.”

Bush spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said the campaign did not want its opponents, or anyone else, to make easy use of the names and addresses of Bush’s 100,000 contributors--from Aab to Zdetwick--to solicit them.

The FEC posts donations to all federal candidates on its own Web site shortly after each filing deadline. Tucker said traffic Friday to Bush’s site indicates there is immediate public interest in who donates money to campaigns and how much they give.