ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, August 29, 1996 TAG: 9608290024
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: COMPUTER BITS
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS and up-to-the-nanosecond election news beckon from the far reaches of cyberspace.
"Follow the money" is always good advice, especially when it comes to politics.
Now it's astonishingly easy for ordinary citizens - at least those with access to the Internet - to keep track of the money flowing into, and out of, the campaign coffers of candidates for Congress and president.
How easy? Let's see what a few clicks of the mouse - and a new World Wide Web site that posts the campaign finance reports the candidates for federal office file quarterly with the Federal Election Commission - will produce on candidates and contributors from Western Virginia:
Let's start with our two congressmen seeking re-election. Does it matter to you that most of Rep. Rick Boucher's campaign funds come from political action committees, while most of Rep. Bob Goodlatte's come from individuals? If so, the "FECInfo" program automatically adds up the numbers and offers the comparison.
Wonder how many of those individual contributors are out of state? The program will compute those percentages, revealing that 24 percent of Boucher's individual contributors are non-Virginians, while 5 percent of Goodlatte's are.
Want to check out just who those contributors are - both individuals and PACs? That's easily done by producing a list of anyone who has given more than $200 to that candidate in the past two years.
Of course, it's not just candidates' campaign finance reports that are available on line; so are the disclosure reports the PACs themselves must file. Say you're curious what your employer's PAC, or the PAC representing your trade group, is doing with its money? Let's check out one with local interest, the Norfolk Southern Good Government Fund.
Regrettably, the program won't add up how much money the railroad's PAC has doled out - you'll have to do that yourself. But it will show that Norfolk Southern has passed around campaign funds to both sides of the aisle - $3,500 to GOP convention keynote speaker Susan Molinari, $2,000 to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, another $2,000 to House Democratic Whip David Bonoir, plus $3,000 to Virginia's Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles Robb and $2,200 to Republican John Warner. And so on.
But the really fun part to this program begins when you start searching nationwide for contributors by name, or by ZIP codes - something that was next to impossible before, unless you wanted to spend weeks sorting through documents at FEC headquarters.
Now you can virtually snoop in your neighbors' checkbooks. Just type in a name, and the program instantly lists all the contributions they've made to federal candidates in the past two years.
Try, for example, David Goode, Norfolk Southern chairman, president and chief executive officer. You'll see he's given $1,000 to Bob Dole; $1,000 to Virgil Goode, the Democratic congressional candidate from Rocky Mount; $1,000 to John Warner and another $1,000 to Owen Pickett, the Democratic congressman representing portions of Tidewater - plus $7,488 to the company's PAC.
Or try searching by ZIP code. A scan of 24014, which covers some of the most affluent sections of Roanoke and Roanoke County.
You'll find that Roanoke lawyer Jeff Krasnow has given $1,000 to Bill Clinton and $500 to the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from South Dakota, while civic leader Heidi Krisch is playing both sides. She has given $1,000 to Goodlatte, $500 to John Warner and another $500 to Harvey Gantt, the Democratic candidate challenging Jesse Helms for North Carolina's Senate seat.
And you'll discover that Bruce Brenner, president of Cycle Systems Inc. in Roanoke has sent off a $500 check to the Institute of Scrap Recycling PAC.
Finally, you can indulge your curiosity by checking out the list of the state's 100 biggest contributors.
It's a humbling experience for anyone from this part of the state: Virginia's biggest contributor is MCI Telecommunications Corp., based in Arlington. It has contributed $162,652 to candidates the past two years. Eight of the top 10 givers are based in Northern Virginia, as are 88 of the top 100. Of the remaining 12, nine are from Richmond and two from Norfolk. The only big giver outside the urban crescent? The United Co., a Bristol natural resources and real estate company, whose $16,000 in contributions ranks it No.98.
News on the Net
Political junkies can get their fix on line in other ways, as well. Two sites offer more up-to-the-minute campaign news than most Web surfers can digest at any one sitting.
The best is Politics Now!, a consortium that posts stories from ABC, The Washington Post, the National Journal, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press, plus its own original reporting.
Other may prefer AllPolitics, a project by CNN and Time magazine.
Both live up to their billing to provide oodles of political news, plus healthy dollops of analysis and opinion, not to mention the occasional spot of fun. For instance, AllPolitics has set Clinton's and Dole's biographies on a visual time line. Click on a year, and you can see what each man was up to then. Example: 1960: Clinton played the sax in his high school band; Dole was getting elected to Congress for the first time.
Cyberspace campaigns
Nowadays, no campaign is complete until it has its own home page. Unfortunately, most campaigns aren't sure what else to do with them, and many resemble little more than bumper stickers in cyberspace. Still, they're there, dispensing the candidate's spin on the news of the day.
The Clinton and Dole pages are typical of campaign pages on line: Both allow you to download video clips of their man in action (warning: The download times are long, while the videos themselves are short), or read press releases until you're blue in the face.
Examples: "President Clinton works to strengthen the values of family and work," or "Dole's Plan Requires Deep Cuts in Education." Hint: Both of those come from Clinton's page.
For what it's worth, Dole's page seems a byte more state-of-the-art: If you're using Netscape 2.0, you can customize the page so that it greets you by name and automatically provides an update on issues you're concerned about.
But Clinton's lets you download the artwork for Clinton-Gore campaign buttons.
The Roanoke Times' on-line voters guide includes links to these, and other campaign sites too numerous to mention.
LENGTH: Long : 118 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: chart - Web sites in today's column KEYWORDS: MGRby CNB