Our own campaign finance sherpa Paul Blumenthal recently wrote about the role that candidates' political action committees (a.k.a. "PACs") play in the complicated tarantella between presidential hopefuls and donors of all sizes. Here in what Blumenthal calls the "beta-launch stage" (Mitt Romney's rockets having already misfired), the yet-to-declare candidates are "using different platforms in the form of specialized political committees, allowing these people to raise money and connect with the all-important wealthy donors who could bankroll their future campaigns."
It's a complicated game, one that's only gotten more sophisticated as campaign finance laws grow increasingly permissive. But there's one aspect of PAC creation that is, and shall ever remain, hopelessly slapdash -- the naming of the PAC.
Maybe there's too much money in politics, or maybe the regulations require careful study in order to maximize the fundraising potential, but for some reason, every time you hear a political action committee's name you wonder if it's something they created by taking a particularly patriotic set of magnetic poetry chits and throwing them at the refrigerator. The end results are often vague and sometimes nonsensical, but they always sort of halfheartedly wave to the notions of America and Freedom and Future and Rising and Reclaiming. Back in 2010, the Sunlight Foundation created a Random PAC Name Generator that mixed hundreds of real PACs in with 28,000 fictional ones, and the degrees of difference between real and fake were startlingly few.
Our 2016-ers are no different: they need cash, they need it now, and their PAC branding efforts are as miserly as ever. Enjoy our rankings of the silliest of the lot, and this year, as you ponder your own campaign contributions, consider maybe just donating a thesaurus.
Candidate Photos: Getty, Associated Press