DO CANDIDATES DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?
One evening in October, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Republican candidate for president, hit the stump at an elementary school in Windham, New Hampshire. It was one of those idyllic New England fall nights, just cool enough for a sweater, and along the winding road to the school’s entrance the leaves were beginning to turn. Volunteers in red T-shirts and navy blazers scurried around with clipboards, collecting tickets and handing out flyers by the door. Inside, they taped campaign signs beneath the basketball hoops, and ushered guests to their seats. Girl Scouts with badge-covered vests and glittering headbands sat cross-legged on the floor in front of senior citizens, whose white hair bobbed above the crowd like the Monadnocks in winter. The tableau was almost Rockwellian.
But unbeknownst to the voters in the room, they were guinea pigs in one of the most brazen experiments in modern politics. The people with the clipboards to whom they’d just given out their names, addresses, and phone numbers weren’t with the Fiorina campaign, despite what some of these volunteers had strongly implied. True, they did all seem to be wearing CARLY T-shirts and CARLY stickers, but technically, it was an acronym. When I asked a man with a clipboard what it stood for, he said he wasn’t authorized to answer.
In fact, the event was run by a super-PAC, one to which Fiorina has, to an unprecedented degree, outsourced virtually every aspect of her operation but the stump speech itself. Signs, shirts, stickers, phone calls, canvassing, event staffing, ads, grisly rapid-response abortion videos—even a documentary, Citizen Carly, which it screened in four states. Super-PACs can accept unlimited contributions from individuals and corporations, but they are prohibited from naming themselves after a candidate. So after the Federal Election Commission threatened the group with penalties last summer, the super-PAC formerly known as “Carly for America” became “Conservative, Authentic, Responsive Leadership for You and for America”—that is, CARLY.
Federal law also prohibits super-PACs from coordinating with political campaigns. The way
