But the winners at this year's Academy Awards were the most campaigning group in memory, delivering speeches that included heartfelt calls for women's rights, African-American civil rights, immigrant rights and gay rights.
"If you want judges to be responsive to public opinion, then having elected judges is the way to do that," said Sean Parnell, the president of the Center for Competitive Politics, an advocacy group that opposes most campaign finance regulation.
"Compared to GLF, most of today's LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] campaign groups are conservative and reformist," he says.
However, most charities and campaigning groups are not set up to account for spending on a constituency basis, and this would require major changes on accounting processes.
Such groups, made possible by federal court rulings last year, are expected to spend far more during the 2012 campaign, rivaling the traditional party and candidate committees through which most campaign money has flowed in the past.
But campaign groups are highly sceptical.
Campaign groups are calling for clearer labelling.
It came up in the normal course of the focus groups that most campaigns conduct, and advisers said it was tested with a so-called people meter, a hand-held device that test groups of consumers can use to register their reaction to products, or in this case, to political language.
The consumer campaign group says most of the internet service providers in the survey received scores of three stars when people were asked to rate their broadband speed.
