Not Bradley’s, however. His office in Concord was humming with activity, with a dozen or more campaign workers manning phones, stapling posters and scribbling on yellow pads of paper.

When I stopped by Gore’s comparatively spacious headquarters in Manchester a bit later, I found one guy hidden away behind a clutter of partitions looking over some papers and watching the Women’s World Cup Soccer championship game. When I asked him why there was so much more going on back at Bradley headquarters, he thought about it for a moment and then told me, “I guess they feel like they’ve got to win here.” Not the kind of response that gives you a lot of confidence in the vice president’s campaign.

To date, however, Bradley’s biggest bump in national news coverage came July 6 when he picked up the endorsement of Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey. That was followed by word that retiring New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s nod will likely follow later in the year.

In official Washington, few senators have better reputations for statesmanship and sagacity than Kerrey and Moynihan. And their decision to endorse former Senate colleague Bradley over former Senate colleague Gore has added still greater luster to Bradley’s image as the thinking person’s Democrat for president. Bradley, Kerrey and Moynihan are really senatorial peas in a pod.

To the vice president’s supporters, of course, this is simply the anti-Clinton wing of the Democratic party lining up against the president’s heir apparent. Both Kerrey and Moynihan have been conspicuously dismissive of the president. And the only other senator who’s endorsed Bradley, Minnesota’s Paul Wellstone, has been a persistent critic of the president from the party’s left-liberal wing.

The pundits are right that there’s more to the Kerrey endorsement. But it doesn’t necessarily say something good about Bradley. Rather, it points to what could be a Bradley presidency’s greatest fault. While Kerrey has a splendid reputation in official Washington, he has distinguished himself largely by remaining aloof from the great political battles of the last decade. Unfortunately, you can say much the same about Bradley.

In the 1993 budget-bill and health-care-reform battles, in the government shutdowns and in the recent impeachment crisis, Kerrey and Bradley could each be found fretting on the sidelines or spouting self-serving criticisms rather than taking any particular stand. Lately that’s been mostly forgotten in the rush of praise for Bradley’s campaign rhetoric about “big ideas.”

Bill Clinton’s personal character may leave a lot to be desired, but on the yardstick of political character Kerrey and Bradley have often come up short. There is no denying Bradley’s allure as a candidate. As a senator he devoted a great deal of time to studying and mastering some of the great political questions of our day — issues like economic globalization and tax policy, which make most voters’ eyes glaze over.

He also was one of the heroes of the 1986 tax reform. One observer who watched Bradley on Capitol Hill in the 1980s recently told me that Bradley delved into the intricacies of policy questions with the intensity you would expect of a lowly staffer, not a senator.

But if Bradley has a fault it is an ingrained quality of indecision and a diffidence in the face of political commitment. Today on the campaign trail he tells his audiences that he will make the fight for universal health care a centerpiece of his campaign and his presidency. But his own role in the health-care debate in 1993 and 1994 paints a different picture.

During his time in the Senate, Bradley advocated various government health-care programs. But in 1994, while supporting health-care reform in very general terms, he drove the supporters of reform to distraction by refusing to throw his considerable political clout behind any particular plan until the very last moment, and in so doing helped kill the prospects for reform.

His stance the following year was even more difficult to fathom. When the 104th Congress (that of the “Republican Revolution”) was cutting every government program in sight and gearing up to shut down the government itself in late 1995, Bradley announced his retirement from the Senate with a “pox on both your houses” speech directed against both parties.

“The political debate,” Bradley intoned, “has settled into two familiar ruts. The Republicans are infatuated with the ‘magic’ of the market and reflexively criticize government as the enemy of freedom, and the Democrats distrust the market, preach government as the answer to our problems, and [prefer] the bureaucrat they know to the consumer they can’t control.”

That was a funny thing for a Democrat to say on the eve of the government shutdown. It’s no wonder many fellow Dems were left wondering aloud just what the hell he was thinking.

The point, of course, is not that Bradley’s political bona fides depend on whether or not he supported the Clinton line during the health-care debate or the government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996. It’s simply that during the big political fights that roiled the nation’s politics over the last decade, Bradley could usually be found on the sidelines rather than staking out or fighting for any clear position.

You could say Bradley was pondering the issues or you could say he was just twiddling his thumbs. Whichever you choose, the fact remains he seldom put himself on the line when things got tough. That’s a glaring fault in a candidate who now promises to take on the big questions with “big ideas.”

By way of contrast, Bradley’s other supporter in the Senate, Paul Wellstone, has frequently opposed the administration. But he’s done so with clear and consistent positions on the issues — most memorably his courageous and risky decision to vote against welfare reform on the eve of his own re-election in 1996.

If political aloofness is Bradley’s failing, it’s virtually Kerrey’s trademark. Despite his vaunted reputation in Washington circles, he has compiled a lengthy list of political flip-flops and no-shows that should have seriously tarnished his reputation long ago.

In 1993, for example, when congressional Democrats passed the president’s budget bill with single-vote margins in both the House and the Senate (and in part lost both houses the next year for doing so), Kerrey kept the capital on tenterhooks, publicly agonizing over whether he could vote for the president’s bill.

Finally, speaking from the floor of the Senate only hours before the bill’s passage, in what can only be called a masterstroke of self-serving rhetoric, Kerrey told President Clinton, “If you are watching now, as I suspect you are, I could not and would not cast a vote that would bring down your presidency.”

Kerrey’s record on health-care reform is similarly dubious. In his unsuccessful 1992 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, he made national health care insurance the centerpiece of his campaign. He supported a “single-player” plan, which he called Health USA, and derided candidate Clinton’s proposal for being insufficiently ambitious.

Under a single-payer system, the federal government in essence becomes the insurer for all the country’s citizens. The single-payer approach has many arguments to recommend it, but it is a very root-and-branch approach to the problem.

But by 1994, when the going had really gotten tough for health-care reform, Kerrey couldn’t even bring himself to support the much less ambitious Clinton proposal. “Disappointed, mystified, totally perplexed,” is how one reform advocate described the reaction among reformers to Kerrey’s turnabout.

“I cannot fathom this gargantuan change,” complained Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA. “He felt resolute about the single-payer approach being the only one that would work. Now, his mantra is the same mantra used by opponents of serious reform: government, bureaucracy, taxes.”

Again, maybe Kerrey just saw the error of his ways on health care reform. But given his track record on other issues, it seems more likely that Kerrey is not so much politically consistent as he is consistently in favor of the political conventional wisdom.

Bradley at least did impressive work on tax reform in the 1980s. But Kerrey has spent much of the 1990s playing the part of the statesman without coming up with a lot of statesmanlike accomplishments. Kerrey’s popularity with political pundits rests largely on his apparent bipartisanship. He maintains his political independence, avoids sullying himself in partisan political squabbling and looks to the big picture — or so the conventional wisdom goes.

That’s the mantle that Bradley has been looking to take up. But that apolitical quality can also simply be an unwillingness to get one’s hands dirty. And independence like that can really just be a tendency to spurt self-serving and picayune criticisms while other people actually do the hard work of pushing difficult legislation.

That is what divides Al Gore and Bill Bradley today. Gore’s problem is not so much that he’s getting the blame for Bill Clinton’s sexual shenanigans. It’s more that he is bruised and hemmed in by many of the political fights and compromises of the administration in which he’s served.

But if, as Bradley claims, the Clinton administration is really so beholden to the “micro-initiatives” that Bradley now criticizes them for, it’s not because they necessarily like reform parceled out in morsels. It’s because they tried big things like health care early in the administration and got their heads handed to them, while guys like Bradley were sitting on the sidelines.

It shouldn’t surprise us that some sushi-and-Starbucks Democrats are eager to jump on the Bradley bandwagon. He’s conspicuously thoughtful and reflective. And he’s not tainted by all that campaign-finance messiness or the uninspiring policy initiatives of the latter Clinton years. But is Bradley just novelty and talk over Gore’s duty and accomplishment?

During his tenure in the Senate, Bradley had about him the quality of a Moynihan-in-the-making, a senator-philosopher who looks to the big picture and asks the big questions, but sometimes turns a deaf ear to his constituents’ more parochial and mundane concerns. The day after he announced his retirement, Moynihan himself told the New York Times that, under the new Republican majority, Bradley had been relegated to the sidelines on a number of issues he cared about deeply.

“That is not a very exciting way to live,” Moynihan opined, “and it is not a very cerebral way to live.” True enough. It probably wasn’t all that fun being a Senate Democrat during Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution.

But we don’t hire senators to enjoy themselves or indulge their interest in the finer points of policy. If politics at its best is about principles and grand ideas, it is also a matter of doggedness and the willingness to stand and fight important political battles, even when they descend into the sort of nasty political trench warfare that characterized the 104th Congress.

The Bradley people have sought to wrap their candidate in the mantle of exile and return. Bradley got fed up with politics as usual in the 1990s. He spent his time in the political wilderness. And now he’s back to use what he’s learned to help the country. At least, that’s the story they’re trying to tell.

In his own way Bradley has always been a compelling figure and his attraction is no less apparent today. When you see Bradley on the campaign trail and listen to his speeches, you want to believe there’s something to the story his people are trying to weave around him. And maybe there is. But his record in recent years, and the political friends he’s lining himself up with, don’t give a lot of cause for optimism.

In fact, even though virtually every Republican presidential candidate kissed Trump’s ring, it’s further down the ballot where he has had the biggest financial impact. He gave $5,000 to Connecticut GOP Senate nominee Linda McMahon last year and $30,800 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, which did not return a request for comment.

On the House side, he gave $2,500 to Rep. Ed Royce’s, R-Cal., reelection effort; another $1,000 to Tea Party favorite Rep. Allen West, R-Fla.; and $2,000 to Rep. Peter King, R-NY. And while he’s given to Democrats in the past, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, all of Trump’s donations in this year’s election cycle were to Republicans, including Romney ($2,500) and disgraced former New York Rep. Chris Lee, who resigned after being caught looking for sex on Craigslist. (Trump gave $500, which appears to have been returned.)

Trump has been especially involved with West, whose campaign did not return a request for comment. The “Apprentice” star appeared with the congressman at a Tea Party rally in Florida last April, and West even said he was open to being Trump’s vice presidential pick if the real estate mogul somehow won the GOP nomination. West told Newsmax at the time that he hoped Trump was “very serious” about his presidential bid. West also accepted $2,500 from Joseph Farah, the birther editor of World Net Daily, in 2008. (It’s Farah’s only political donation the past three cycles.)

But perhaps no candidate has closer or deeper ties to Trump than McMahon, who also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. McMahon made her money through the WWE professional wrestling league, which her husband founded.

Trump has been involved in the sport for years, which suits his flamboyant and phony image. Wrestlemania IV and V were both held at Trump Plaza, and a video that made the rounds on Twitter yesterday shows Trump tackling Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania 23. Trump and two beefy wrestlers hold down and restrain McMahon before shaving his head to wild cheers from the packed arena.

Trump’s ties to Linda McMahon became a campaign issue earlier this year when Democrat Chris Murphy slammed his opponent for taking Trump’s money. “That’s right, the man who led the charge to see President Obama’s birth certificate, report cards and test scores has set his sights on Connecticut’s Senate seat,” Murphy campaign manager Kenny Curran said in a fundraising email to supporters in February. The Connecticut Democratic Party even cut a web ad attacking McMahon that featured Trump.

Much is being made of Toobin’s revelations about the dramatic internal political divisions and infighting within the court triggered by the CU decision (more on that later). But what I think is most politically significant in Toobin’s piece is that it shows the dramatic rightward – and backward — march of Republicanism over the last 30 years. In January 1982, Ronald Reagan famously wrote in his diary, “The press is trying to paint me as trying to undo the New Deal … I’m trying to undo the Great Society.” Reagan was anxious to unravel the anti-poverty programs Lyndon Johnson pushed into place (though not Medicare), but he collaborated with House Speaker Tip O’Neill to pass payroll tax increases to stabilize Social Security for the next 50 to 60 years.

Today’s Tea Party, of course, is going after what’s left of the Great Society and the New Deal too, trying to privatize Medicare and Social Security and undo the labor protections passed by Congress and many states in the wake of the Great Depression. But the Roberts court wants to go back even further, to the Progressive Era, when some politicians in both parties recognized that the omnipotence of Gilded Age robber barons had to be curbed – and that campaign finance regulation was a good place to start.

Back then a conservative Supreme Court majority also disagreed with that Progressive reform push. In an 1886 tax case it first held that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection laws applied to corporations. In its 1905 Lochner ruling, striking down a New York law limiting bakery workers to a six-day 60-hour week, it declared such regulations a breach of contract rights, an “unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right of the individual to his personal liberty or to enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family.” As Toobin observes, “In simple terms, the majority in Lochner turned the Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, into a mechanism to advance the interest of business owners.”

Progressive era reform also included campaign finance regulation, starting with the 1907 Tillman Act, which prevented corporations from directly contributing to campaigns. The Court let the act stand, but over the years a series of rulings by conservative majorities have managed to establish that money is “speech,” and though contributions could be regulated, expenditures – speech – could not.

Toobin shows decisively that the court could have kept its decision on Citizens United quite narrow. Attorney Theodore Olson wasn’t seeking to strike down McCain-Feingold, but to clarify that it applied to television commercials, not to 90-minute political “documentaries” such as “Hillary: The Movie” (a shriekingly negative “documentary” on the woman who was expected to be the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee). But in oral arguments the conservative justices sought to broaden their purview, and Roberts helped them along. “As the Chief Justice chose how broadly to change the law in this area, the real question for him, it seems, was how much he wanted to help the Republican Party,” Toobin writes. “Roberts’s choice was: a lot.”

After taking a shot at drafting the CU ruling himself, he later assigned it to “swing vote” Anthony Kennedy, whose views on campaign finance regulation reliably put him with the conservative majority. Assigned to write the dissent, outgoing Justice David Souter accused Roberts “of violating the Court’s own procedures to engineer the result he wanted,” Toobin says. That’s when Roberts took the extraordinary step of asking that CU be re-argued – though with five justices already committed to a sweeping attack on McCain-Feingold, the outcome of those re-arguments were never really in doubt.

And indeed, Kennedy again wound up writing the majority opinion, which found that “The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations” since 1886, and that in McCain-Feingold “the Government has muffled the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.” It’s unclear from the context whether Kennedy is saying what he seems to be – that corporations “best represent the most significant segments of the economy.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, a moderate Republican once on the court’s more conservative end, wrote in his dissenting opinion, “Five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.” Stevens’s dissent continued for a record 90 pages.

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Toobin’s conclusion is no less scathing: “The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.”

It’s worth noting that the most spirited opposition to Citizens United is coming from Montana, where the ties between Gilded Age corporate abuse and campaign finance regulation are perhaps the most explicit. Copper mining interests essentially owned the state in the late 19th and early 20th century, but Montana Progressives pushed a tough campaign finance law as a way of clawing back control of their state from the “copper kings,” who Mark Twain wrote “bought judges and legislatures as other men buy food and raiment.” Montana’s state Supreme Court upheld that 1912 “Corrupt Practices Act” in January, putting the state on a collision course with SCOTUS. Gov. Brian Schweitzer has been one of the most articulate voices against Citizens United, and supports a state ballot initiative that would ban corporate money in politics and make it state policy that corporations are not people.

“Montana’s going first, but we have before,” Schweitzer told the Huffington Post earlier this month. “It was Montana in 1912 that banned corporate money from our elections. We don’t mind leading and we believe it has to start somewhere. This business of allowing corporations to bribe their way into government has got to stop.”

But in a world where the Citizens United decision is precedent, it’s hard to imagine that ballot measure surviving a legal challenge. Toobin’s piece makes clear the stakes in the 2012 presidential race as vividly as anything else does: American democracy can’t survive the appointment of more justices like Roberts, Sam Alito and Antonin Scalia, who mainly serve the interests of corporate America. Mitt “Corporations are people, too, my friend” Romney can be expected to give them company in the years to come if he wins the White House.

It also lobbies actively to scuttle shareholders’ rights – specifically to limit their ability to weigh in on political giving. Last year, for instance, New York state lawmakers introduced a pair of bills requiring corporations to get shareholder approval before making donations to politicians or outside groups, such as super PACs. Backers argue the measure would provide crucial safeguards for investors. “Giving shareholders a voice ensures that their money isn’t used for political purposes they don’t agree with or that are detrimental to the corporation,” explains Adam Skaggs, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school.

Nevertheless, ALEC’s Public  Safety and Elections Task Force — which has since been disbanded amid the outcry over stand your ground — sent out an “issue alert” to its New York members urging them to vote the measure down. Among other things, the document, which was dated Feb. 15, 2011, argued the bill imposed “oppressive and impractical requirements on corporations,” which restricted corporate free speech and thus could “deter and delay these entities from participating in political debate.”

“Not only do these burdensome requirements impede upon First Amendment rights, they are also unnecessary,” the memo continued. “Shareholders always have the option of voting out board members and removing management who engage in independent expenditures contrary to the interests of the company and its owners … Legislation punishing speech stifles uninhibited public debate and undermines the very purpose of the First Amendment.” The effort was apparently successful: The New York legislation is currently stalled.

ALEC’s advocacy on the issue apparently began shortly after the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizen’s United decision. In September 2010, the group issued a resolution in support of the ruling, which focused largely on limiting shareholders’ ability to weigh in on companies’ newly unencumbered political contributions. Among other things, it advocated barring shareholders from suing corporations based on their political activities on the ground that civil suits were merely “designed to silence corporate speech.” Some of ALEC’s critics find this argument puzzling. “The idea that the owners of a corporations — and, make no mistake, shareholders are the owners — shouldn’t have any influence over their political activities is absurd on its face,” says Lisa Graves, executive director for the Center for Media and Democracy.

But lawmakers have apparently taken ALEC’s recommendations to heart. Under pressure from the organization, last year at least nine states legislatures — including those in Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin — jettisoned bills requiring companies to seek shareholder approval for their political giving, according to research by Common Cause. The group also found that ALEC’s top-spending corporate members have devoted nearly $16.5 million to shaping legislation in these states over the last decade. (ALEC did not respond to requests for comment.)

In the absence of legislation, many shareholders are taking matters into their own hands and launching campaigns to force corporations to be more transparent. Nearly a third of all shareholder resolution in 2012 call for more disclosure on political giving, according to a report by the investor advocacy group As You Sow, which also notes that “unruly” investors, outraged that their money is secretly being used to fund dark-money movers like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, plan to turn out en masse and “occupy” annual shareholders meeting. The implications of this trend are far reaching. “Besides giving shareholders what they need to hold corporate managers accountable about how assets are being used, shareholder disclosure would provide the general public with information about who is trying to influence how they vote in the general elections,” explains Skaggs of the Brennan Center. This kind of transparency could be a game changer, since the power of dark-money groups hinges at least partly on their ability to mask the agenda and funding behind their work.

Seeing as how its main function is to cut checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising — and how the whole ethos of the super PAC, down to its very name, is of and for the mega-donor — that Restore Our Future would get so small a gift in the first place seems a little insane. After all, the super PAC receives 97 percent of its donations in amounts of $25,000 or more, according to an analysis by the New York Times. Yet in the remaining months of 2011, eight additional donors would make small donations while scads more wrote out five-, six- and seven-figure checks. Already this year, there are a few dozen more.

So who are these enterprising micro-donors, who gave $50, $25, even $10 to a $43 million super PAC? I called a few, and as it turns out, wealthy Romney supporters aren’t the only ones drawn by the promise of unbridled spending. But nor were they all Romney superfans. Rather, the small donors to big money fall somewhere in the middle — like the big guns, they’re willing to do what it takes to oust Barack Obama from the White House. Like the rank-and-file of modest means, they’re not all sure that Romney is tough enough to do it.

Take Nancy Moening, a retiree in Florida who gave Restore Our Future $25 in January. Moening said that she is not so much pro-Romney as she is anti-Obama, and she was glad to give to a group that will blanket the airwaves with an anti-Obama message. Moening couldn’t recall exactly what prompted her to donate, but she was positive it was a news item about the president that would have fired her up — it couldn’t have been something Romney did, she explained.

Barbara Pope, a Georgia realtor who gave Restore Our Future $75, chose Romney’s super PAC over his campaign because she fears Romney is not the hard-sell type of candidate. “That’s not his m.o. He has incredible strengths but he won’t be the one to sound the horn.” Then there’s the fact that Romney’s campaign can’t coordinate with the super PAC — if they can’t commingle money or messaging, she reasons, both arms of the Romney effort need her support. She repeats this a few times for emphasis.

“Restore Our Future has more flexibility in what they do. They can basically do anything they want and they can do more with the money they have,” said one Colorado donor, who gave $250 and did not want me to use his name. “It’s good to be the bad guy.”

Others were less impassioned. David Sneed, a North Carolina resident and registered Democrat, likes the fact that Restore Our Future’s ads showed a “clear contrast” between Romney and his GOP competitors. He gave $25 to the cause. Another donor, film location scout Ryan M. Place, didn’t even seem to like Romney all that much. He just liked being a part of the process. “[Restore Our Future] has spent over $40 [million] so far on the vain statesman and scandal-free, whitebread, Harvard-grad, private equity enthusiast,” Place wrote in an email. So Place spent $25, to finance “Mitty the Unmittenable Mitten Romney via Restore Our Future,” as he put it. “His campaign certainly doesn’t need my money but it makes me feel good to donate.”

There was lots of hedging — a few donors weren’t sure who was spending more strategically, Romney’s campaign or his super PAC, and so they doubled down just to be on the safe side. There was one disillusioned Newt Gingrich fan who wanted to fund the effort to muddy the former speaker’s name. (To my disappointment, I was unable to reach the Massachusetts donor and possible Ron Paul convert who gave $17.76). There were many euphemisms for negative advertising, and explanations as to why these ads were a necessary evil to the race. Really, the one thing that they pretty much did all have in common was their utter confusion as to what made me so curious about small donors to super PACs in the first place. As Moening put it, not a little dismissively, “I don’t know why that’d be interesting.”

When asked whether it felt a little strange to give to an organization so clearly meant for super-donors, most of them took this as a challenge to the legal right to unlimited giving.

“I don’t have any disdain for people who’ve had the benefit of capitalism,” said Pope (sounding, more so than at any other point in our conversation, like a true Romney fan). Added another donor, “It doesn’t bother me how much money someone gives. That’s their right.” Still another had never thought about it — and didn’t see why I would have.

Others didn’t think much of the disparity.

“That’s kind of how I feel donating in general, because I’m not contributing some astronomical amount,” Justin Copeland, a legal assistant who gave $25, said. “But every little bit helps.” Sneed felt the same. He knew that most donors to Restore Our Future gave up to millions at a time. “But I also knew that if people give more small contributions, it’ll make an impact,” he said.

Refreshing an approach to political giving as this is, it’s unclear whether that’s true in practice. Every little bit certainly helps the Romney campaign, which buys line items like plane tickets, mouse pads and pencil cups. For them, $5 still has some buying power compared with the maximum donation of $2,500. But $5 to Restore Our Future, compared with the $3 million Bob Perry gave on a single day in February — or even the relatively modest $250,000 checks from Bain Capital executives — not so much.

For me, chatting at length with Restore Our Future’s small super-donors caused me to reevaluate the notion of the small donor entirely. I was on the fence, for instance, about contacting Gary Chartrand, a marketing group executive who’d given $260.01. That’s far from an astronomical donation, but it’s a little more than the minimum amount that would be publicly reported by the FEC, had he given to Romney’s campaign. In that case, my dilemma was solved when I realized that his gift of $260.01 actually brought his total Restore Our Future giving to a healthy $50,260.01 — but, all things being equal, that is still “small” in the super PAC world.

Then there was John Atherton, who’d given $500 to Restore Our Future. Atherton, an affable Poughkeepsie, N.Y., retiree, explained that he’d made a donation to Restore Our Future after he’d maxed out with the Romney campaign. That brings his total giving to $3,000. “So I wouldn’t call myself a small donor,” he told me.

Maybe not. But if I were just glancing at Restore Our Future’s latest receipts — where Atherton’s $500 contribution is nestled between the Apollo Group, $75,000, and Rod Aycox, $100,000 — you could have fooled me.

Moving the Ogallala was not enough, however, to keep the project from running into snags. As part of the licensing review, a group of technical staffers from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality spent three years sifting through data from WCS and the roughly 600 boreholes it had drilled. In the end, they found two water tables dangerously close to the site — in fact, one was 14 feet or less from the bottom of the trench where WCS intended to bury the waste. Based on these findings, in August 2007, four of the team’s engineers and geologists sent a memo to the director of TCEQ’s Radioactive Materials Division, warning that groundwater was “likely to intrude” on the proposed facility, possibly causing radiation to seep into the water supply — details that were later reiterated in a meeting with senior management. “It was clear that the problems with the site could not be fixed, and that any radioactive material stored there was probably going to leak,” recalls Glenn Lewis, a technical writer who was part of the team. “It was just a matter of time.”

Nevertheless, two months later TCEQ’s executive director Glenn Shankle recommended that the commissioners who head the agency and have final licensing authority give the project the go-ahead. He then ordered the dumbfounded technical team to begin drafting the license. After laboring over the details, in January 2009 the commission, which is made up entirely of Perry appointees, voted 5-to-1 to approve the license. The same month, WCS hired Shankle as a lobbyist. “What happened in this situation is that politics worked to get an unqualified company a license to operate a low-level nuclear waste facility,” concludes Lewis, who along with two other team members resigned in protest.

Why bring this up now? Because the WCS saga offers a window into the often murky political motivations of its owner, Harold Simmons, a man with the power to sway this year’s presidential race. An 80-year-old billionaire who grew up in an east Texas shack with no running water, Simmons amassed his fortune largely by staging aggressive corporate takeovers and running polluting businesses, many of them in heavily regulated industries. And he has spent his money liberally on conservative causes. This election season alone, Simmons has donated more than $18 million to conservative super PACs, making him the deepest of the deep-pocket super PAC donors who are upending electoral politics.

Unlike fellow mega-donors Foster Friess and Sheldon Adelson, Simmons isn’t partial to any single candidate or political cause. He’s given generously to the super PACs backing all the top Republican presidential contenders. And he’s the No. 1 donor to Karl Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads, which is supporting Republicans across the board. Simmons says it’s his loathing for Barack Obama that’s driving him to spread his money around. “Any of these Republicans would make a better president than that socialist, Obama,” he told the Wall Street Journal recently. “Obama is the most dangerous American alive.”

But there may be another motive at work. Simmons has a history of giving far and wide to grease the wheels for his business ventures — particularly his nuclear waste repository. And a raft of changes in the pipeline at federal agencies could determine whether the site is eligible for billions of dollars in new contracts.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for example, is considering allowing depleted uranium (more than a half-million tons of which are languishing at sites around the country) to be discarded in shallow land burial sites, like WCS, even though the National Research Council and some independent scientists suggest it’s better suited to more secure repositories. Similarly, the Department of Energy is weighing options for disposing of what is known as “greater-than-class-C” waste, the most radioactive low-level nuclear debris. In the past, it was generally considered too dangerous to dump in shallow land sites, but that route is now on the table.

These deliberations, which began under the Bush administration, aren’t meant to be political. But progress under Obama has been halting, particularly on the NRC front. In fact, in January the NRC voted to abandon the depleted uranium rulemaking track it had been on since 2008 — a track favorable to WCS — and go back to the drawing board.

Then there are the lucrative nuclear-waste disposal contracts the DOE parcels out to private companies. Typically, they’re negotiated piecemeal and cover about a million cubic feet per year, but right now there’s a much larger prize for the taking: a five-year contract for up to 27 million cubic feet of debris scattered among our national labs. WCS lobbyists are pounding the halls of Congress and the DOE in a bid to sway the outcome. Simmons may be betting that having Republicans in office — particularly ones whose victory he bankrolled — could tilt the odds in his favor, as it has in the past.

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Waste Control Specialists started out as a run-of-the-mill hazardous waste dump. The company’s original owner, Ken Bigham, had designs of breaking into the nuclear waste market to cash in on the dismantling of the nation’s Cold War stockpile, but he lacked the money and political clout to push the project through. Then in 1995, a lobbyist Bigham worked with in Austin suggested he join forces with Simmons and tap his deep political connections. The pair eventually struck a deal, under which Simmons paid Bigham $25 million for a controlling stake in the company. In 1996, WCS applied with the Texas Department of Health for a license to build a processing and storage facility for radioactive waste that was awaiting permanent disposal and approached TCEQ for permission to dispose of waste from federal programs. Initially, the answer from both agencies was a resounding no. In fact, the Health Department called WCS’s proposal “severely deficient.” That December, Roy Coffee, a top aide to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who has benefited from more than $4.2 million in Simmons family donations, met with the TCEQ’S director. One week later, the agency changed course, saying it was open to WCS’s Texas facility accepting federal waste, pending approval by the TCEQ commissioners. The license for the processing plant was granted the following year.

But this was just a steppingstone toward WCS’s real goal of remaking itself as a permanent nuclear waste repository, with a view toward landing lucrative government contracts. According to Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in Lone Star politics, in 1999 WCS published a study of “emerging market opportunities.” It found the company could earn nearly $40 billion by handling waste for three federally funded programs. The problem with this plan was that, under Texas law, private companies were barred from operating nuclear waste dumps. WCS tried to get around this hitch by lobbying Congress and the DOE to override the ban and contract directly with the company. According to a 1998 investigation by the Dallas Morning News, Simmons and his associates even managed to persuade their allies in Congress — all of whom had taken large sums from Simmons — to block the promotions of a key DOE staffer who opposed the plan. When the DOE refused to give in to these tactics, WCS sued the agency.

At the same time, the company assembled a powerhouse lobbying team in Austin and began pushing to rewrite Texas law. Between 1995 and 2003, WCS spent more than $2 million lobbying the Texas Legislature — part of a shock-and-awe campaign that rattled the Lone Star State. “They rolled over us like a steamroller,” says Tom Smith, who directs the Texas office of Public Citizen, an advocacy group that fought the legislative changes. “I’ve been lobbying for 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it.” Simmons and his employees also gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Texas politicians. In 2003, the Texas Legislature voted overwhelmingly to allow privately owned nuclear waste dumps.

Simmons, meanwhile, began wading into presidential politics. In the run-up to the 2004 election, he gave nearly $84,000 to Republican candidates, committees and PACS. He also sank $4 million into the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign, which torpedoed John Kerry’s presidential prospects. Perhaps Simmons was put off by Kerry’s tough talk; the otherwise mild-mannered candidate turned into a fire-breathing crusader when the subject turned to nuclear waste. He promised to block the Yucca Mountain repository, which he called a symbol of “recklessness,” on the grounds that it sat above a freshwater aquifer and proposed warehousing radioactive debris where it was generated rather than trucking it to far-flung sites for disposal.

Once Bush had beaten Kerry at the polls, Simmons chipped in $100,000 toward his inaugural ball. The Bush DOE, meanwhile, granted WCS a $15 million contract to store residue from a plant in Fernald, Ohio, that had processed uranium for nuclear weapons. The DOE maintains the decision was not politically motivated. “The subcontract for storage and disposal of the Fernald silo residues was awarded competitively by the Energy Department’s site contractor when it became clear that the initial plan to dispose of the waste at another DOE facility was not feasible,” the agency said in a statement. Nevertheless, it was a curious choice, given that the plant had been owned by another of Simmons’ companies, NL Industries, before being taken over by the federal government for Superfund cleanup in 1992 — a process that has cost taxpayers $4.4 billion.

It was also during this era that WCS applied for the license to operate its nuclear waste dump, which was later approved over the objections of Lewis and other technical staff. In its P.R. materials, WCS has cast the detractors as a “small group” of rabble-rousers who opposed the project and “launched a public misinformation campaign in an effort to slow the company’s progress.” As for the safety concerns TCEQ staffers raised, WCS spokesman Chuck McDonald insists they have no merit. “We’ve sunk nine years and $500 million into this project. We had 600 core samples taken at every conceivable depth,” he says. “There is no threat to any water supply.” McDonald adds that the only water found anywhere near the site was brackish and sealed off from major aquifers: “They could age date the water and it was 16,000 years old. That moisture had been sitting there since the last ice age.”

The license WCS finally received in 2009 covered two facilities: one for commercial waste from Texas and Vermont (the two states have a joint-disposal agreement), and one for waste from federal agencies. It also allowed WCS to accept the more dangerous B and C classes of low-level radioactive debris — something no other facility in the country can do.

For Simmons, the license was a godsend. Within months of it coming through, Forbes ran its annual ranking of the richest people in America. The blurb on Simmons, who clocked in a few slots above Ross Perot and George Lucas, noted that he had lost $1.4 billion in the previous year, but that he was “planning to make it back with [his company’s] recently approved low-level radioactive waste disposal license.” As part of its deal with the state of Texas, WCS got to operate the dump for 35 years or more, assuming it met periodic licensing obligations, and keep the bulk of the profits. (Andrews County also got 5 percent.) The state and federal government would then take over and manage the site in perpetuity. While WCS has to put up roughly $140 million in “financial assurance” to cover closure, “corrective actions” and post-closure maintenance, it has managed to persuade the state to accept mostly stock from another Simmons-owned company in lieu of cash for the first five years. And critics argue $140 million is not nearly enough to cover ongoing costs. “WCS is going to walk away and the state will be left holding the bag for thousands of years,” says Lon Burnam, a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives and a stalwart opponent of the dump. WCS also prevailed upon the generous folks of Andrews County to put up $75 million in bonds to help finance construction. (Two Andrews residents later sued, saying the bond referendum, which passed by a meager three-vote margin, was riddled with irregularities. But the lower courts sided with WCS, and the Texas Supreme Court, whose justices have received more than $90,000 in Simmons donations, declined to hear their appeal.)

Still, WCS was not satisfied. Under the terms of WCS’s license, the commercial waste facility was capped at just over 2 million cubic feet, only enough to meet about a third of Texas and Vermont’s needs. Nevertheless, the company began lobbying the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission to let it truck in commercial waste from the 36 other states that have no place to dump their radioactive debris. In late 2010, the commission proposed amending its bylaws to make this possible, but not everybody was on board. Two of the commission’s eight members openly opposed the plan, and two Republican appointees who supported it were about to be replaced by the incoming Democratic governor of Vermont. (As part of the joint-disposal agreement, Vermont gets two commission seats.) According to Reuters, after it became clear that the commission might deadlock, Gov. Perry’s office offered one of the detractors, Austin resident Bob Gregory, a coveted appointment as a university regent. Naturally, this would mean relinquishing his commission post. Gregory declined. So in January 2011, shortly before the Vermont Republicans’ terms expired, the commission — the bulk of whose members were Perry appointees — called a vote. Gregory pleaded with his fellow commissioners, saying it was “beyond preposterous” to ram the proposal through without even reading the 5,000 public comments. Nevertheless, the measure passed by a 5-to-2 margin.

Simmons, meanwhile, began currying favor with state-level politicians around the country. According to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics and Texans for Public Justice, he has poured more than $400,000 into state-level races outside Texas since 2005, almost all of them in states that have commercial nuclear power plants and no waste repository. “When you look at how he’s moving his money around to other states, there’s a very clear pattern,” says Texans for Public Justice research director Andrew Wheat. “He’s targeting politicians who can serve his financial interests.” The same is true in Washington, where Simmons has been dumping tens of thousands of dollars into congressional campaigns. He’s also promised to sink another $18 million into conservative super PACs between now and Election Day, meaning his giving this campaign season will outstrip the rest of his career combined.

Simmons is coy about the motives behind this outpouring. As he told the Wall Street Journal, “You never talk about what you want when giving money.” But he’s been in the game long enough to know that, in politics as in business, timing matters. And for WCS this is a deciding moment. Last November, the Andrews plant celebrated its grand opening with an elaborate ribbon-cutting ceremony, featuring cameos by several politicians. In his remarks, delivered from the edge of a gaping pit, WCS president Rod Baltzer trumpeted the fact that it was the first new radioactive waste dump in the United States since the 1980s. “This has never been done before, and in my opinion I don’t think it will be ever done again,” he said. “There’s just a unique set of characteristics that this facility, and the community — and the ownership — has provided.” Later this month, trucks packed with radioactive debris will begin rumbling into the facility, and the true test of Simmons’ grand scheme will begin.