Opinion: Where sports and politics intersect

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It probably shouldn’t be surprising if your common name is Mitt and your first son is named Tagg. But new fundraising and expense reports just filed with the Federal Election Commission show that Mitt Romney seems to be quite a baseball fan.

Times correspondent Dan Morain, who’s specializing in financial aspects of the campaigns, has an interesting story in this morning’s Times and on this website on the importance of small donors to the Barack Obama campaign.

But he’s also been poring over some of the reports’ smaller print for Top of the Ticket. And he’s discovered that during the last quarter Romney paid $31,500 to the Boston Red Sox, presumably involving his party for donors at Fenway Park. But he also spent another $15,791 on tickets to five other baseball teams ranging from $4,565 to the Cincinnati Reds to $1,716 to the Baltimore Orioles.

His campaign also bought tickets to games of the Los Angeles Dodgers ($4,050), Atlanta Braves ($2,210) and Texas Rangers ($3,250). No mention of how much on parking, hot dogs and beer.

Rudy Giuliani, on the other hand, is known as a fervent New York Yankees fan. He received $13,200 from Yankees employees (C’mon, A-Rod, show us the money!) and $7,100 from employees of the Houston Texans, in the home city of Giuliani’s law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani.

The former New York mayor also collected $21,400 in donations from down-home folks who work for NASCAR. But here’s the interesting stuff on Rudy:

Giuliani reported paying travel expenses of $8,555 to Zuffa, LLC., in the second quarter for use of its jet plane. Zuffa, as Morain points out, is the group that owns the Ultimate Fighting Championship, that so-called mixed martial arts form of fighting that seems to have no rules, which is one reason it’s so popular among the desirable 18-35 age group of men.

John McCain once called these bloody exhibitions...

‘human cockfighting.’ Frank Fertitta III and his brother, Lawrence, are majority owners of Zuffa and Station Casinos and together they have raised more than $100,000 for Giuliani.

So we’ve got an Ultimate Fighting/NACAR fan in Giuliani pitted against a baseball fan in Romney, who better get hooked up with the pro wrestling crowd for some more muscle.

In other financial observations from this weekend’s reports, we learn that the real reason for former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore dropping out of the GOP race, reported here Saturday afternoon, may have had less to do with his vision for the country’s future and more to do with the present and the absence of cold hard cash.

Gilmore didn’t have enough of it to keep going. He raised only $391,000 in the first six months of 2007 and reported having cash on hand now of $61,764 and debts of $129,000. His largest debt is to Mercury Public Affairs for polling and travel expenses. One of Mercury’s owners is Terry Nelson, who got canned as McCain’s campaign manager last week. Not a good week for him.

Comparatively speaking, former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee is rolling in cash. He raised $1.3 million in the second quarter and still has $437,000 cash on hand.

If you want to check out some of these numbers for yourself, the F.E.C. website is here. And the Commission has an interesting national map showing presidential campaign contributions by state here.

--Andrew Malcolm