Political analyst Norman Ornstein talks about Washington's campaign, politics and money issues.Norman J. Ornstein literally wrote the book on campaign financing. Ornstein, a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., in 2000 co-authored The Permanent Campaign and its Future.
Ornstein also helped write the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, large parts of which have been struck down by the courts.
In an interview for Friday's Arizona Week, Ornstein lamented the state of campaign financing and politics, based on the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the inactions of the Federal Election Commission.
"You put the court together with the Federal Election Commission, which is utterly feckless and has no regulatory capability to do anything at all, and it's a wild, wild west," Ornstein said.
He said candidates and those wanting to finance their campaigns are finding many ways to get through and around the rules and regulations in place, and that combined with the Supreme Court and the FEC will mean, "in the 2012 campaign, we're going to see this in full flavor and in an extraordinarily distasteful way."
"Now what we're seeing is you don't give directly to a candidate," Ornstein said. "You give to somebody else, who gives to somebody else, and then they find ways to coordinate all that. It not only means that you can have candidates directing money they're not supposed to direct, but it makes it that much harder for anybody to figure out who's giving this money, for citizens and voters to be able to decide if somebody's being bought along the way."
Reporter Michael Chihak further explores campaign financing tonight on Arizona Week. Watch now:
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