Cameron, Beshear campaigns’ tit-for-tattling to FBI both part of same rotten system | Opinion

In the tit-for-tattling that is the Kentucky Governor’s race, the Beshear and Cameron campaigns have already turned each other into the FBI, and it’s not even July.

So if you want the short version on how it’s going, the answer is obviously: not great.

What we have here is the excruciating kind of humongous-dollar, incessant social media campaign in an off-year, which leaves every slimy, under a rock PAC and dark money group the time and cash to blanket the Kentucky race. And for what? So they can blanket every airwave and surface with ads that viewers will soon tune out. Did I mention it’s not even July?

The most excruciating part is that we really do need to pay attention to it all. The two tattletale tales bear plenty of scrutiny; my colleague Austin Horn has a good roundup of all the details. On the one hand, thanks to retired but tireless Tom Loftus, we found out about a Republican Mayor of London who is already in trouble for a gas giveaway during his campaign, which makes you think he might not be fully up on campaign finance laws, who then loads up his credit card with $200,000 in campaign donations to Andy Beshear and the Kentucky Democratic Party. From his friends and family. The campaign returned the money, but we have to wonder what might have happened if Loftus hadn’t been nosing around.

The Cameron campaign immediately called for an FBI investigation.

Then over at the Daniel Cameron campaign, it turns out that Cameron himself directly solicited campaign contributions from a recovery center company that his office was investigating. The $7,600 donated by Edgewater Recovery Centers executives was returned. Cameron also recused himself from the investigation.

The Beshear campaign immediately called for an FBI investigation.

Now, whether you think the FBI has better things to do or not, these are just small pieces of a corrupt system of campaign finance created by our own Mitch McConnell with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, you know, the one that said that corporations were people. That decision unleashed unlimited torrents of dollars into our campaign system, and meant that candidates (and electeds running for re-election) have to spend all their time begging for money. No wonder Cameron got confused about who he was calling.

Think about this: In 2020, Democrat Amy McGrath spent $90 million to lose the Kentucky Senate race to McConnell. He spent just $60 million. That’s $150 million on one Senate race in one of the poorest states in the country. What does it accomplish? I dunno, ask Kelly Craft, who hired a lot of slick Washington strategists, spent millions of her husband’s money and came in third in Fayette County, where she lives.

It’s a corrupt, rotten and completely bipartisan system that turns off voters and makes them even more cynical about our sad little republic. The worst part is we really can’t look away. The best thing we could do is somehow overturn our entire campaign finance system. That’s not going to happen, so the least we can do is pay attention.