In the quiet moments between reading Battlefield Earth and flip-flopping on abortion, Mitt Romney's been assiduously courting the best of the Bush bundlers. According to The Politico, "[w]ith individual donations to presidential candidates capped at $4,600, it is crucial for campaigns to recruit people with the networks and know-how to convince friends and colleagues to give. In the jungle of campaign finance rules, the extinct six-figure givers have been replaced by the bundlers."
That seems right. And I'm actually interested in this question of bundlers. The original theory of campaign finance reform was that we'd limit each individual's influence to $4,600. Unintended consequences being what they are, however, what we've really done is massively increase the influence of a particular set of rich people: Those who who know a lot of other rich people, and are willing to ask them to money. Whether that empowers a different class of plutocrats -- hedge fund managers rather than heirs, say -- is an open question. But it's one worth asking. And it's more evidence, at least to me, that the likely next step for campaign finance reformers is to pass policies amplifying the influence of small donors (say, by matching or tripling donations under $250 from non-lobbyists), as constraining the rich doesn't seem to work.
