"They treat their campaign fund like a personal slush fund," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal-leaning watchdog group. "Every time you're on your way to campaign office and you stop at Starbucks, you call that a legitimate campaign expense?"
Federal law seems clear enough: "A contribution or donation . . . shall not be converted by any person to personal use."
In other words, if you were going to buy it anyway, you can't charge it to your campaign, said Paul S. Ryan, a lawyer with another outside watchdog group, the Campaign Legal Center.
State-level campaign reports have their share of novelties. In New Jersey, State Sen. Stephen Sweeney expensed more than $120,000 in dinner tabs to his campaign funds - along with more than $1,700 worth of cigars. In Pennsylvania, where the law says campaign cash can be spent only on "influencing the outcome of an election," then-Mayor John F. Street once reached into his campaign coffers to underwrite his loved ones' trip to Rome.
The Federal Election Commission lists items a campaign should not cover: mortgage or utility payments, clothes, vacations, and admission to clubs or events not tied to campaign activity.
Even so, critics say, the FEC is slow to intervene. And others who might detect campaign-finance misdeeds - the House and Senate Ethics committees - are less likely to act against a colleague, said Craig Holman, government-affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, another watchdog group.
"There is this general attitude that candidates should run their own campaigns," Holman said. "As a result, you see lots of all kinds of expenditures that range from humorous to downright unethical and illegal in some cases."
