Filling the Coffers

Fresh off her victory in November, Massachusetts Attorney General-elect Martha Coakley has already begun fattening her campaign coffers again in very public fashion. This despite the fact that Coakley barely spent any money on a campaign that ran uncontested in the Democratic primary and only faced token Republican opposition in the general election.

Last Thursday, Coakley placed calls to a number of prospective donors around the state, urging them to attend her “Annual Winter Event,” a lavish fundraiser at the Union Oyster House this evening where suggested donations range from $125 to $500. While it is not exactly groundbreaking news that politicians interminably raise money, Coakley’s audacious fundraising drive only a month after coasting to victory underscores a disturbing problem with publicly electing our Attorney General: an official whose job it is to gauge legality impartially gets bankrolled through campaign contributions.

As the chief attorney for the state of Massachusetts, it will be Coakley’s job to oversee the state’s prosecutors and their cases, ensure that businesses and elected officials are complying with state law, and generally work “to protect the public interest” (as the website of current Attorney General Tom Reilly phrases it). Cause for concern thus arises when her campaign deposits cash from executives of companies likely to have business before her office, and scrutiny of the Coakley committee’s deposit reports over the past year indicates numerous donations that could potentially lead to such conflicts of interest.

Most notably, executives of HMO Blue Cross Blue Shield donated over $6,000 to the Coakley committee days before her election win. In the past, criticism has been heaped on Reilly for accepting donations from this same healthcare provider while simultaneously having business dealings with it. To provide another example, within months of being fined $1 million by Reilly for misleading business practices, Comcast executives and lobbyists unloaded over $3+,000 into Coakley’s warchest.

A major distinction must be drawn between legislators and the Attorney General accepting donations of this nature. Unlike state legislators, who are drafting and voting upon bills, the Massachusetts Attorney General spearheads judicial investigations, and it is a central tenet of the judicial system that all are equal before the law. How can one be certain that the Attorney General’s office will investigate impartially if it receives payoffs from companies that are frequently investigated like Comcast? To put it simply, there are often clear-cut right or wrong answers about what an Attorney General should investigate; the same cannot be said about whether a legislator should support a bill.

This is not to assume that Martha Coakley will be unduly influenced by the nature of her funding. Her tough-minded yet fair prosecutorial record would suggest otherwise. I would not even be surprised if she refused such donations upon being sworn in, following the model of Eliot Spitzer, who refused donations from companies he had dealings with while Attorney General of New York. (Although, as of press time, the Coakley campaign had not responded to a request for her to clarify her position on this issue.)

Yet even if Coakley is unscrupulously fair-minded as Attorney General, Massachusetts citizens will inherently be suspicious of the financing she received from companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield during campaign season. This is more an indictment of the Massachusetts system of electing its Attorney General than it is a critique of Coakley. After all, it would be unprecedented among Massachusetts Attorney Generals for her to eschew such funding before being sworn in. While she may have been in a perfect position to set an example, having had no legitimate opposition to campaign against and therefore less necessity for funding, this would have been asking a lot of Coakley.

Massachusetts must follow the lead of states such as New Jersey and amend its Constitution to make the position of attorney general one that is appointed by the governor. Until then, our attorney generals will chow down on Oysters Rockefeller with the same executives they investigate for years to come.



Stephen C. Bartenstein ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Lowell House.