Top Bush Fundraisers Move On to Inaugural

Three of the biggest fundraisers for President Bush’s reelection campaign will lead efforts to raise money for his inauguration celebrations in January, the White House announced Friday.

Mercer Reynolds, who served as finance chairman of the reelection campaign; his business partner Bill DeWitt; and Los Angeles financier Bradford Freeman, a founding partner of Freeman Spogli & Co., will head fundraising.

Jeanne Johnson Phillips, a Texas businesswoman who organized the president’s inauguration in 2001, will be chairwoman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee. For the 2001 inauguration, Bush supporters raised more than $40 million.

White House and Republican officials said they had not yet decided on a fundraising goal or sketched out plans for the celebrations. They will hold their first discussions next week.

“Everyone is very enthusiastic with the win of the president,” said Freeman. “I think it will be a big celebration.”

Since the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law took effect, inaugurations remain one of the few events for which politicians can receive unlimited corporate donations. Although donors are limited to $2,000 per campaign, supporters gave as much as $100,000 each to the 2001 inauguration.

In a recent interview, Phillips argued that large corporate donors such as those who contributed to the president’s first inauguration made it possible to lower ticket prices and sponsor free events for the public.

“The fundraising seems to come easily for all inaugurals,” Phillips said. “You have a huge, pent-up demand.”

But campaign finance watchdogs call contributions to the inauguration a kind of loophole for donors.

“The old ‘soft money’ can no longer go to the political parties, but there is still this loophole that allows them to give to the inaugural committee,” said Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization that tracks the role of money in politics.

“It is still one step from the electoral process, but the people who give still do so in order to curry favor with the administration,” he said. “And it has become one of the last few ways they can directly benefit the president.”

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, which aims to reduce the influence of money in politics, said the public debate over campaign finance had generally not included donations for inaugurations, in part because they occur after the campaign and in part because few want to argue that taxpayers should foot the inaugural bill.

“I don’t know what [the donors] expect to get, but history tells us that anyone putting up huge sums of money like this to help defray these kinds of expenses may well look for favorable treatment in the future,” he said.

On Friday, the White House also released a list of the inauguration’s finance committee members. Among major donors on the committee are Dawn and Roland E. Arnall, Orange County mortgage bankers who gave more than $5 million to the Progress for America Voter Fund, a so-called 527 organization that underwrote campaign efforts on behalf of the president.