Obama less than transparent when it comes to disclosing bundler info

A web-savvy campaign that promises open government shouldn’t make it so hard to learn about its financial backers.

Federal election law doesn’t require candidates to report information about bundlers, the supporters who convince wealthy friends and colleagues to contribute piles of money to campaigns. It’s up to the candidates to decide whether to release such info.

So which presidential candidate is most forthcoming?

Google “John McCain bundlers” and you’ll see this link to the McCain web site at or near the top of your results: http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/fundraisers.htm.

Google “Barack Obama bundlers” and you’ll hunt in vain for the official list on the campaign site. (However, search for “Barack Obama open government” and you’ll find numerous official pages.)

After several unanswered email messages and a phone call to the Obama camp, we finally obtained the URL of a page on the site, listing campaign bundlers. We’d like to print it for you, but it’s so long it runs off the page. So here’s the link.

Unlike the McCain list, which includes full names, city, state and occupation, the Obama list omits occupation and often provides nickname only, rather than full first name and middle initial.

Failure to provide this additional information makes it difficult and time-consuming to uncover much about the people pouring millions of dollars into the most expensive presidential race ever.

We suspect that the organization’s records are complete. It’s only the public list that falls short, and the omissions appear to be deliberate.

When nonprofit groups such as OpenSecrets.org asked the candidates to present information about bundler occupations and employers, the McCain camp complied. The Obama camp did not.

And if all those whiz kids in the Obama online operation were instructed to do search-engine optimization so that the bundler page turned up at the top of Google results, they could finish the job in a flash.

This may sound like whining from bleary-eyed data crunchers (a web equivalent of ink-stained wretches), and it is.

But we’re also concerned about openness - or lack of it - before and after the election.

Bundlers won’t go away after Nov. 4. Many of George W. Bush’s bundlers, known as pioneers and rangers, wound up with federal appointments such as cabinet posts and foreign ambassadorships.

So here’s the list of people who have raised at least $50,000, with several added names, middle initials and connections that don’t appear on the Obama version.

We’ll continue to add information as we find it. But the Obama organization has made it a scavenger hunt.

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