Show me the money

Major contributions to the campaigns of Sen. Hillary Clinton and other candidates have made the apparel executive a national political insider, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

But Hsu’s history turns out to be checkered, at best. In 1991, the Hong Kong native pleaded no contest to a charge of fleecing investors in what authorities called a Ponzi scheme. Along the way, he left a wake of bankruptcy filings and bitter investors.

As news of his background surfaced last week, the Clinton campaign rushed to disassociate itself from Hsu, vowing to donate to charity the tens of thousands of dollars he raised for the senator.

But is Hsu’s troubled background really what should be most embarrassing to leading Democrats?

Oh, in hindsight they must now wish they’d had someone run a routine background check on Hsu. Presumably that will now become standard procedure.

But no, the activities of Hsu that should most embarrass Democrats form a pattern of subterfuge motivated by the very “campaign finance reforms” these Democrats dreamed up, themselves.

The stated goal was to keep “rich people” from having “too much influence” on politics. The favored Democratic solution was to limit by law the size of donation any individual can make to a political campaign. In their dreams, the campaigns of populist Democrats would thus be financed by millions of $5 (or $500) donations, while “fat-cat Republicans” would be starved of funds, since their smaller cadre of “rich buddies” would be unable to fork over tens of thousands of dollars apiece.

In real life, it didn’t work. There just aren’t enough small contributions. So this reform gave birth to the “campaign bundler.” The bundler — Hsu was the prince of bundlers — hands over tens of thousands of dollars, claiming it was collected in little pieces from lots of blue-collar Joes.

Common sense would lead to considerable skepticism that some $49,000-a-year mailman from Daly City, Calif., and his homemaker wife actually donated $213,000 to political candidates since 2004 — $55,000 of it to Mrs. Clinton, alone — as Hsu reported.

Common sense might lead anyone to suspect that Hsu was merely “re-assigning” money from bigger, fat cat donors to evade the campaign finance laws.

The great irony is that the candidates caught in this first big “bundling” scandal turn out not to be Republicans, at all. They’re Democrats.

Why, could it be that Democratic politicians such as Hillary Clinton are actually funded by big union and corporate and trial-lawyer “fat cats,” who need a “bundler” to transfer their money into different envelopes, disguising how much money they’re actually giving?

Tell us that it isn’t so.