The stats read like the salary list of a major league baseball team: ARCO - $804,842; Michael Kojima - $613,850; Sony Corp. $332,650; Walt Disney Co. - $196,207.
But this game was politics, played by corporations and private individuals from California who donated large sums of soft money during the 1991-92 elections. The final score: $13.4 million in soft money contributions from California alone.
Ronald Campbell of the Orange County Register analyzed campaign-contribution computer tapes from the National Library on Money & Politics to tally up the scorecard on California's soft-money contributors.
Soft money donations go directly to the national political party instead of a particular candidate. This provides an exception to the federal law that limits campaign contributions to $1,000 a person and prohibits businesses and labor unions from contributing.
Using FoxPro on a 386, Campbell quickly generated a long list of wealthy Californians who took advantage of the soft money loophole. But who were these people and corporations? That proved to be the hardest and most interesting part of Campbell's research.
Many contributors were household names, such as Sony, Chevron, Sunkist and Peter Norton.
But what about Ben D. Kelts, or C.S. Ishiyama & Co.? To unmask mystery donors, Campbell turned to a new "toy" in the Register library - a national phone directory on compact disc. Campbell struck gold.
"I went to the machine, typed in 'Kelts, Ben,' and there was one of them," he said. "Of all the dumb luck, to find a guy who gives $100,000 listed in the phone book."
Campbell also got help from his fellow reporters in identifying other contributors. After identifying most of the donors, Campbell then broke the contributions down by industry. The help he needed was right there on computer tape. The National Library on Money & Politics had designated fields on the tape with interest codes.
"That is very useful," Campbell said. "If you want to know how much money came from the entertainment industry, you have the computer go through, take the interest code and sum the amount."
Party loyalties became evident through the industry breakdown. Hollywood and labor unions went Democrat; energy moguls and agriculture went Republican.
But something was missing - the developers. Campbell noticed only a small number of them appeared among the big campaign contributors. An explanation was needed; Campbell decided to compare contributions to those made in 1988, a peak year in the Orange County economy.
Campbell looked once again to the National Library of Money & Politics. Because the Federal Election Commission did not require parties to report soft money until 1991, the library warned Campbell that the 1988 tapes would not be complete. Campbell was willing to take the risk.
"It is constructive to compare the partial picture of the late '80s with the complete picture of the '90s, because the contrast was quite glaring," he said.
Glaring, indeed. Real-estate developers who had dominated the county's soft-money heavy-hitters in 1988 were replaced in 1991-92 by a restaurant group and a health-care conglomerate.
The incomplete data from 1988 did cause a few problems. Several corporations listed as contributors in 1991-92 were known to be members of the Team 100, a designation for those that donated $100,000 or more to the Bush/Quayle campaign in 1988. When the 1988 computer tape failed to show several Team 100 members and the Republican party declined to release information on donations above $100,000, Campbell could only guess that the corporations may have donated larger amounts in 1988 as well.
Campbell is still following up on the story. Since the article's publication on Feb. 1, Campbell has discovered the identities of two previously unknown donors and is working on several others. But one question still weighs heavily on his mind.
"What the blazes are they getting for the money?" Campbell said. "The side with the most money wins. But what they do because of that money, I don't know."