The names of the Super PACs behind Presidential candidates so often seem flighty and evasive—Right to Rise, dedicated to the rise of Jeb Bush; Conservative Solutions, which thinks the answer is Marco Rubio; and Keep the Promise, Keep the Promise I, Keep the Promise II, and Keep the Promise III, apparently categorized so that Ted Cruz can more efficiently file away the promises he has made to their respective wealthy donors. And so the Super PAC named CARLY for America might seem refreshingly direct and candid—no-nonsense, something that Carly Fiorina, the candidate whom it supports, presents herself as being—unless, that is, one is passingly conversant with campaign-finance laws.
The reason that Super PACs choose odd names is not that they are run by manipulative or secretive people—or not just because of that—but because the Federal Election Commission’s rules say that they can’t take a candidate’s name. The Supreme Court, in its Citizens United ruling, which ushered in the new Super-PAC era, did not leave many restrictions on the ability of wealthy donors to sponsor campaigns, but Super PACs are not supposed to “coördinate” their activities with the official campaign organizations—the ones that have limits on the amount that they can accept from any one donor. “Coördination” has become a hazily defined term, and often seems to serve mostly to keep up the appearance of distance, rather than the fact.
So what makes Carly special? Or—and there is a distinction—CARLY? On June 22nd, the F.E.C. sent a letter to what was then called Carly for America, noting that it was breaking the rules and asking it to stop. And so Carly for America changed its name to CARLY for America: CARLY was now not a name but an acronym: Conservative, Authentic, Responsive, Leadership for You and for America.
The full, spelled-out name of the group may be somewhere on its Web site, but, if so, it is pretty hard to find, unlike the names CARLY and Carly Fiorina. (A search this morning didn’t turn it up.) The first thing that you see on the CARLY site is a pop-up with the heading “CARLY CRUSHED THE DEBATE,” then footage of and a quote from Fiorina. There is also a tab leading to a section called “From Secretary to CEO.” All this is similar to the campaign’s official site, Carly for President, where the “Meet Carly” page begins, “Only in the United States of America can a young woman start as a secretary and work to become Chief Executive of one of the largest technology companies in the world.” (In this week’s New Yorker, I write about why that story also isn’t quite what it seems.)
The confusion is not just virtual: earlier this month, NBC noted that, at a Fiorina town-hall event in New Hampshire, CARLY staffers set up the signs and the tables, and even helped to “take down the chairs and clean up.” CNN reported that, after a similar event in Iowa, Fiorina explained to reporters that the CARLY people were, in effect, just passing by. “We publicize every event on my schedule, and anyone can come,” she said. “What you see happening is a Super PAC is organizing people. We’re not coördinating with them. We’re not asking them to. I don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t tell us what they’re doing.” And yet, CNN found that the only people handing out literature were affiliated with the Super PAC, raising the question of who the campaign thought would be performing such basic tasks if the CARLY people hadn’t shown up. When asked about that, Fiorina referred the question to the Super PAC. A spokeswoman, quoted by CNN, said, “We’re just helping to build the buzz.”
If Carly and CARLY have a message, it is that stretching the rules to an absurd degree shouldn’t embarrass anyone. Not that her fellow candidates need to be told that. Jeb Bush directly helped Right to Rise raise about a hundred million dollars well past the time when it was clear that he was running for President, even though he hadn’t officially announced it. Indeed, that is why it took him so long to make the decision—he had to decide when to stop soliciting donations with no upper limit. (The last time that the Super PACs had to file real numbers, in July, CARLY had raised about three and a half million dollars; Fiorina’s debate performances and rise in the polls have undoubtedly changed the scale of financial interest.)
There is so much money, coming in so fast, that the system for making sure that the rules are followed is in a state of paralysis. The F.E.C., which needs a majority vote for significant actions, has three Democratic and three Republican commissioners, and it is often deadlocked. This spring, in an interview with the Times, Ann Ravel, the F.E.C. chairwoman, announced that, in terms of the 2016 election, “the likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim.” In response, Lee Goodman, one of the Republican commissioners, published a piece in Politico in which he accused Ravel of “hurling tired, caricatured broadsides at my Republican colleagues and me, rather than acknowledging our honestly held legal and philosophical commitment to First Amendment values.”
“I certainly stand by what I said,” Ravel told me, when I spoke to her by phone this week. I asked whether the lack of consequences had changed the way campaigns acted. “I think the effect on behavior is that—and I’ve been told this by lawyers who practice in this area—many of the lawyers and the candidates understand that there is little enforcement or little likelihood of enforcement, and are much more likely to push the envelope and do things that in past years would be considered risky,” she said. (Ravel wouldn’t comment on Fiorina or any other specific candidate.) She did tend to think that, as a matter of “strategy,” if not principle, her Republican colleagues opposed the entire regulatory system, even when it was applied to Democrats; they had, at one point, blocked an investigation into how e-mail lists were transferred between a Super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton and one of her official campaign organization. Lately, Ravel had reconceived her mission as speaking to students, civic groups, and whoever would listen, to let them know “that I can’t do my job—and that it’s significant to them that I can’t.”
