Champions of Transparency Close Fund-Raisers

Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama have reputations as crusaders for transparency in government and campaign finance, but neither presidential contender has shown much interest in letting the sun shine in on their own fund-raising events.

Press accounts of fund-raisers President Bush held with Mr. McCain in Phoenix on Tuesday night focused on a decision to move the events to a private home to accommodate Mr. McCain's desire not to spend a lot of time on camera with the outgoing president, who is suffering from dismal approval ratings.

However, little of the news coverage dwelled on or explored the decision by the senator of Arizona to exclude reporters and press photographers from virtually all of his fund-raising events.

Mr. Obama skewered Mr. McCain for the secrecy surrounding the joint fund-raiser with Mr. Bush, which produced only a few seconds of video of the president and the presumptive Republican nominee together at a nearby airport.

"He's holding a fund-raiser with George Bush behind closed doors in Arizona," Mr. Obama said Tuesday at a campaign stop in Nevada. "No cameras. No reporters. And we all know why. Senator McCain doesn't want to be seen, hat in hand, with the president whose failed policies he promises to continue for another four years."

Some reporters said Mr. Obama's critique would have had more credibility had he not followed it up by excluding cameras from his own fund-raiser yesterday at a Denver hotel.

"Looking at what's going on this year, I'm sort of appalled," the political director for CBS News, Steven Chaggaris, said of the level of press access to candidate fund-raisers. "It's not a good precedent to be setting."

As is its practice, the Obama campaign did admit a pool reporter from the Wall Street Journal to yesterday's fund-raiser, attended by a standing-room crowd of about 200 donors.

A spokesman for Mr. McCain, Tucker Bounds, accused Mr. Obama of hypocrisy on the access issue. "It isn't a surprise that Barack Obama would make a political attack and then go ahead and contradict himself immediately," Mr. Bounds said.

The level of access to presidential fund-raising at the moment is far more limited than in 2000 or 2004, according to reporters who covered those races. The 2000 cycle was the most accessible because the scandal over illegal foreign donations to the Democratic Party in 1996 prompted President Clinton and Vice President Gore to open up the process. From 1997 to 2000, cameras were allowed into most fund-raising events Messrs. Clinton and Gore held at hotels and similar venues, while a print reporter witnessed and an audio feed was provided of remarks at many of the same private homes that are now off-limits.

ABC News's off-air reporter on Mr. Bush's 2000 campaign, John Berman, said the campaign welcomed coverage of fund-raisers early on, to add to the candidate's air of inevitability, but retreated a bit later. After taking office, Mr. Bush abandoned Mr. Clinton's second-term policy of allowing some coverage of money-raising events at private homes.

"Once the press ceded this, we were never going to get it back. It's gone," Mr. Berman said yesterday.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama, Jennifer Psaki, said her camp is proud of its record. "Clinton and Gore were the sitting president and vice president. Obama is not even the nominee yet," she said. "We are open to expanding this policy down the road when Obama is the nominee, but at this point we have gone further in opening up these events than either Clinton or McCain."

Mr. Bounds called Mr. McCain "the most accessible candidate to the media in history." The senator's fund-raising events are "closed for the comfort level of our donors," the spokesman said.

The Obama campaign's concessions on the access issue have come, often reluctantly, at the prodding of a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, Lynn Sweet. She noted in a Web log entry that a fund-raising trip Mr. Obama's wife, Michelle, made to the Los Angeles area yesterday was not only closed to the press but was entirely absent from her public schedule.

Ms. Sweet said a truly transparent approach to fund raising involves more than the official donation reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. "Disclosure has to do with more than filling out forms after the fact. It's where you're going, whose house you're in," she said.