Goddard's campaign pays $15,000 for Cheney trip
Cheney trip costs murky
When Vice President Dick Cheney came to Middle Georgia last month for a private campaign fundraiser, taxpayers picked up most of the travel costs.
Congressional hopeful Rick Goddard's campaign shows a $15,000 payment to the Republican National Committee to help pay for the trip, which undoubtedly cost much more than that. A campaign spokesman said that's what the campaign was asked to pay for the visit, which raised more than $100,000 for Goddard's campaign to unseat U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga.
But press liaisons for the RNC and the vice president's office wouldn't say whether that money was actually forwarded from the RNC to the federal treasury. Spokeswomen for both entities simply referred the question back to each other.
The full cost of the trip, or any presidential or vice presidential trip, remains a mystery. Security costs, which are significant, are classified. And federal officials typically won't discuss non-security costs, either.
Federal regulations require that a campaign pay the equivalent of a first-class airline ticket for each campaign traveler on a flight - meaning people deemed to be traveling with the president or vice president for a political reason and not an official one.
The vice president's press office wouldn't say who determined exactly how much the Goddard campaign should pay. Nor would they say who was considered a campaign traveler when the bill was calculated or who made that decision.
A spokeswoman for the Federal Election Commission, which enforces campaign finance rules, said the FEC doesn't make that count or tabulate the bill. She said she didn't know who did in this case.
The first-class ticket rule was put in place during President Jimmy Carter's administration, partly because previous rules were considered too harsh. Large reimbursement bills from the government had led President Lyndon Johnson to travel on a small private plane in 1964. Because of space constraints, the president's doctor and the person carrying the country's nuclear security codes flew on a separate plane, according to "Presidential Travel: The Journey From George Washington to George W. Bush," a book by university professor Richard Ellis.
The reimbursement rules at the time were "perhaps tilted too far in the other direction," said Ellis, who teaches at Willamette University in Oregon.
But in the current age, Ellis said, the taxpayers "absolutely" pay the bulk of costs when the president or vice president hits the campaign trail, and "nobody knows" how much. In his book, Ellis referred to this as a "massive taxpayer subsidy for the increasingly frequent campaign activities of incumbent presidents."
In the case of Cheney's visit, the Goddard campaign said it paid what it was asked to, but declined to discuss specifics of the bill.
"When it comes to consistently protecting Georgia taxpayers, no one will fight harder than Rick Goddard," campaign spokesman Tim Baker said. "That's why Rick instructed his campaign to bend over backwards to make certain we were in full compliance of the law."
The campaign will benefit from another fundraising trip later this month, as President Bush is scheduled to attend a July 22 Goddard fundraiser in Atlanta.
The Government Accountability Office, which investigates federal spending on behalf of Congress, studied the presidential and vice presidential travel for a 2000 report that focused on the cost of foreign travel. That remains the latest GAO report on the issue, according to a GAO spokeswoman in Washington. The study put the cost of operating C-32 jet airplanes like the one Cheney flew on to Macon last month at about $14,000 an hour, in 1999 dollars.
That doesn't include the federal government's security costs, the cost of getting the vice president's limousine to a location or the local security costs. When Cheney visited last month, his motorcade consisted of 18 vehicles and a helicopter. At least seven local law enforcement agencies provided support, and Baker said none of them submitted a bill to the campaign.
The Bibb County Sheriff's Office provided some security, but no extra or off-duty personnel were needed, making their security costs low, sheriff's spokesman Lt. George Meadows said.
"One of the duties of the Bibb County Sheriff's Office is to make sure that visiting high-risk dignitaries and leaders leave Bibb County as safely as they arrive," Sheriff Jerry Modena said in an e-mail to The Telegraph.
To lower reimbursement costs, presidents will sometimes pair a fundraising event with a public event, such as a speech or ceremony. That allows them to justify the public cost without billing a political campaign. But Cheney's visit last month was for a Goddard fundraiser at a private home in Perry, where people paid as much as $2,300 for a picture with Cheney.
The vice president's contact with the non-paying public consisted of shaking hands with a few local Republicans as he made his way from Air Force Two to his limousine, waving at members of the media on a nearby riser and passing motorists as local law enforcement ran rolling road blocks on the route to the fundraiser.
As it did when Bush visited twice to raise money for Mac Collins' 2006 congressional run, Marshall's campaign condemned the trip.
"This is wrong," Marshall spokesman Doug Moore said. "Rick knows it is wrong, but he's doing it anyway. It's a character issue."
Such complaints are nothing new. When President William Howard Taft overran his travel budget for a trip to the Southern states in the early 1900s, opposing congressmen fought to keep the taxpayers from covering the costs, according to Ellis' history book. Their argument: Taft made partisan speeches throughout the trip.
Decades later, the argument remains unresolved. President George H.W. Bush's election year travels were criticized in 1992, and U.S. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., came to the president's defense.
Requiring the president to pay the actual costs of flying Air Force One would make the president "a prisoner of the White House," Ellis quoted Burton as saying.
To contact writer Travis Fain, call 744-4213.
