Reuters: Porn Candidate Offers Date to Big Donors

Mary Carey

John Kerry

Mary Carey, the porn star who joined the California gubernatorial race in a highly-successful bid for PR, began offering on her web site personal meetings with donors of $5,000 or more to her campaign fund. The e-commerce story was quickly picked up by Reuters as an unusual practice, but it seems quite pedestrian in electoral politics. I myself have been sent emails (certainly along with tens of thousands of other bank account holders) from 2004 presidential hopefuls John Kerry and George W. Bush. Both offer a personal audience at a fund raising event that will cost from $250 to $5,000, depending on the degree of access desired.

Not that the Carey campaign should be taken very seriously (platform item two is a tax on breast implants), but it does seem as though the reporters covering the race have become inured to the prostituting of access, unless it allows for the publication of lurid suggestions and women in bikinis.

Missing in the Reuters story is the fact that California has a law against offering quid pro quo services for campaign donations. The invitations sent by Bush was carefully designed to not appear as a direct offer to purchase access, as appears on Carey's site. Kerry's site, however, offers a strikingly similar offer. Readers will note, however that a chance to spend an evening with porn star Carey costs about 400 times the price of a chance to win a day with Senator Kerry.