Audit Time For Bradley Campaign
At Bill Bradley headquarters in West Orange, N.J., a skeleton crew is manning the phones these days. Yet callers are still greeted with the plucky phrase, "Bradley for President."
It's vaguely depressing to hear the loyal battle cry of those working for a vanquished candidate; reminiscent of the introductions such men and women receive at party conventions, when they are incautiously referred to as "the next president of the United States," despite the preponderance of delegate arithmetic working against them.
Though his campaign is gutted, and shrinking by the day, campaign and federal officials say it could take years before "Bradley for President" officially goes dark. That is because, having accepted federal matching funds for his primary campaign, Bradley's campaign must now undergo a federal audit to determine how much of its remaining funds must be returned to the Treasury.
As of February 29 - the most recent data available - Bradley's campaign had $2,957,650 on hand. This figure doesn't take into account the money he spent and raised in March ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries.
Despite never having won so much as a caucus, Bradley did raise a lot of money - more than $20 million - and while most of it was spent in the heat of battle, a nice chunk of change by any individual's standards remains.
Enter the Federal Election Commission. FEC auditors will check expenses and decide how much of the money left in the Bradley for President campaign belongs to the feds and how much belongs to the candidate.
"Matching funds will go back to the federal treasury," says Bradley spokesman Tony Wyche. "We'll have a compliance deptartment that still has to function for quite some time, to deal with all the bills and legalities, and that sort of thing."
It can be a long process, officials say.
"It does take awhile. The individual being audited has ample opportunities to respond the to audit," says Federal Election Commission spokesman Ian Stirton.
Also, Dollar Bill has to decide what to do with any money left over.
"They can't convert it to private, personal use," Stirton says. But many other options are open: holding the money over for another run (say in 2004); campaigning for other Democrats; forming a PAC, as John McCain is doing; or giving the money to charity are popular routes taken by other defeated candidates.
Stirton says the money can be used for charity, party-building, for a later campaign, or as he put it "for anything that's not illegal."
"Can they give it to the Gore campaign? The answer is no." Stirton said, adding "I don't think too many campaigns wind up with a whole lot."
But, if anyone was wondering whether, like John McCain, Bradley is mulling a return to the fold in 2004, Wyche said that no money will be held over. Apparently, if Bradley decides to run again, he'll start raising money again from scratch.
"We've obviosly got to shut the campaign down," Bradley spokesman Eric Hauser says. "Beyond that we'll see: His plans for the future are unclear. We won a lot of delegates, and we haven't pledged those over. We've got a long way to go before the convention."