Thursday, July 30, 2009 4:21 PM

Shedding Sunlight Through "Party Time"

Want to know the what and where on the latest fundraiser for your lawmaker? Well, Under the Influence has added a new feature to help you keep track. We have added a box linking to the Sunlight Foundation's Party Time blog (www.politicalpartytime.org), which has a rolling list of fundraisers. You can find that box by scrolling down the right-hand side of the blog. You can see updates throughout the day.

The fundraiser list is put together by a team of people managed by Nancy Watzman (her photo is to the right), who works from Denver for Washington, DC-based Sunlight, a nonpartisan nonprofit foundation devoted to increasing transparency in the political process. Sunlight's funding comes from a variety of sources. (The major funder is the Omidyar Network, the philanthropy of Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pamela.You can see all of Sunlight Foundation's funders here: http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/funding/)

Watzman, who has been at the foundation for just over a year, has a background in following money and politics, having worked at such groups as Public Campaign, the Center for Responsive Politics, and the Center for Public Integrity. She has also written for numerous publications, including Harper's,The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly. She is the co-author of "Is That a Politician in Your Pocket?: Washington on $2 Million a Day" (Wiley Books, 2004).

Under The Influence's Bara Vaida interviewed Watzman to introduce her and Party Time to our readers.

Under the Influence: How did you come up with the idea for Political Party Time?

Watzman: My colleague Bill Allison kept a stash of fundraising invitations that a lobbyist source had been giving him for years. They were in a pile in his office. Anybody who covers money and politics in Washington, DC knows that these invitations are ubiquitous. They come in by the hundreds over e-mail and fax machines to lobbyists around town all the time. They are an essential piece of how Washington works, but are largely unknown outside the Beltway. With the technical whizzes at the Sunlight Foundation, we saw a way to create something that to our knowledge had never been done before: gather all these invitations on a website and create a searchable database based on the information they contain.

How much time does it take to create your database?

It's a pretty labor intensive affair. We collect our invitations from a number of anonymous sources. We process them so we can provide electronic images of the invitations on the website. Interns then spend many hours doing the data entry. It's a lot of work to keep up with the flood of invitations.

Where does your information on the fundraisers come from?

Over the years we've developed lobbyist sources who are willing to give us the invitations. Many lobbyists are sick of getting so many of them and are happy to provide them to us, as long as their names are not attached. We also ask the public to send us any they come across through our website: http://politicalpartytime.org/upload/. Anybody who is reading this, please send us your invitations! We know we only get a portion of the events that are happening, which is frustrating. However, in just the year we've been in operation, we've collected more than 5,500. Still, we'd love to get more.

In reading about all these fundraisers, is there anything that has struck you?

The relentless nature of the fundraising that goes on. Lawmakers are constantly at it. And as you look at many of these over time, you see the same names showing up again and again as hosts for various events. It's a very inside game.

We've all known for a long time that a lot of fundraising goes on, so what do you think the benefits have been so far of all your efforts?

We feel like we're shedding sunlight on a process that's largely been in the dark. Sure, everybody knows there's lots of fundraising. But it packs a lot more punch when you find out that a lawmaker who is a major force in the health care debate is sipping wine with a bunch of health care lobbyists at a fancy restaurant. It helps make transparent to the public how this process really works.

I see fundraiser after fundraiser on your list, it's almost overwhelming. As a journalist, what do you think I should be looking for on this list, and what should readers be looking for?

While we blog about what we find, we don't have time to follow the thousands of leads that the information provides. We now have a way for people to download the data underlying the site (http://politicalpartytime.org/data/all/) which can help you search for patterns in a global way. It's always interesting to look for trends and see if you can find an explanation. There are a lot of fun ways to slice and dice the data -- for example, you can do searches and find out all the events involving golf, or hunting, or Bruce Springsteen concerts.

Reporters and bloggers have used the information in all kinds of interesting ways. For example, Jim Boren of The Fresno Bee pointed out that his local representative, Dennis Cordoza, probably didn't want to admit why he didn't attend a graduation speech [a local college] -- he just happened to have a fundraiser scheduled at Pimlico Race Course in Maryland at the time (http://blog.politicalpartytime.org/tag/michelle-obama/).