Cashing In on Obama and McCain

[groovedaddy]

JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are not the only winners to emerge from the long presidential primary season.

The two presumptive nominees, along with the many candidates who bowed out along the way, spent more than $900 million through the end of May, about $470 million more than was spent on primaries in 2000, when both major parties last had competitive primary battles. Nearly half of the current spending has been paid to just a few dozen companies.

Before November, hundreds of additional millions will be paid to the lucky few businesses that have contracts with the winning candidates for campaign necessities like media consulting, airplane charters, direct mail and telemarketing. And as campaign schedules become more crowded, companies that coordinate rallies and events, and those that make signs and bumper stickers, will also rake in dollars.

Even companies that do not cater to the political arena can reap great rewards, according to spending records each candidate has filed with the Federal Election Commission. Bank of America and American Express together received about $7 million in credit card and banking fees from the Obama campaign alone. Verizon was paid more than $4 million by all the candidates combined to put phones into the hands of their employees.

To be sure, some of the companies that received the highest payments passed the money on to other vendors. The Obama campaign, for example, paid $85 million to GMMB, a media consulting firm. But $69 million of that was used to buy advertising time, which means that much of the money paid to GMMB ended up at local television and radio stations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/06metrics.html?th&emc=th