Give pols free money, no rules

Newspaper and Journal Articles-Written

Main

Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

But citizens shouldn't despair. The ingredients for real campaign finance reform are right at hand, concealed within a variety of reform proposals that have been floating around Capitol Hill. All we have to do is mix ingredients from two radically different proposals, one from the political left, one from the right. Such a reform won't solve every flaw in the system. But that's also why it would work: By realistically avoiding the problems that can't be solved, it gives us a chance to resolve the ones that can.

The one thing that no reform can do is eliminate private money from the political system. Such money has always been with us, since private citizens have always had a stake in the outcome of elections. As long as politics has an effect on the economy, private money in politics will always remain. Gil Troy, a historian at McGill University, notes that Andrew Jackson may have spent the equivalent of $1 million getting elected in 1828, and FDR used to sign leatherbound volumes commemorating the Democratic convention and sell them for $100--complete with ads sold to federal contractors for up to $2,500 each. Running for office has always cost money, and today, in a country of 267 million busy, media-saturated people, conducting a political campaign is more expensive than ever. Beyond doubt, it will be more expensive next year and more expensive still the year after that. Despite all the rules ever devised, candidates find ways to get the money they need in order to win.

Because reformers are dismayed about the corrupting role of private money, most of them have failed to face the reality that money will always be there. Instead, they have tried to tame and channel it with a variety of ever more complicated regulations--which politicians, in turn, have quickly found ways to circumvent. Over the years, as campaigns have found loopholes and bureaucrats have written new rules to plug the loopholes, the system has grown so complex as to be virtually incomprehensible. This complexity serves the interests of politicians because it lets them camouflage questions about their ethics behind hairsplitting debates about compliance. That's what has happened with the Clinton fund-raising controversy. What began as an investigation into sleaze--illicit foreign donations, coffees with lowlifes in the Roosevelt Room--has devolved into a tiresome debate about arcane and seemingly pointless campaign finance regulations.

Any reform that aims at limiting campaign donations will inevitably focus everyone's attention on misleading minutiae--such as whether Vice President Gore placed fund-raising calls from his government office (possibly illegal) rather than from, say, the Democratic Party headquarters (probably legal)--without appreciably slowing the money flow. The first step toward a sane system, then, comes when we stop trying to limit private money and instead allow voters and candidates to choose a larger degree of independence from it.

How? With two relatively simple reforms, each strengthening the other. First, create a way for candidates who really don't want to take private money to run for office. This would mean providing ample public financing to candidates who agree not to accept or seek (or collaborate in seeking) donations from anyone else. This ancient goal of political liberals might cost between $1 billion and $2 billion a year, depending on the formulas used. Though any number of plans are possible, a good model is the system that Maine recently enacted for its state elections. In a national system based on the Maine model, primary candidates would qualify for public money by raising a specified amount of small donations from individuals (they can raise and spend private money only for that purpose). Once over that threshold, they would be given 75 percent of the average cost of the last two elections in their district (not 100 percent, because publicly funded candidates are spared the cost of raising money). At those rates, an average candidate for the U.S. Senate could expect to receive something over $3 million in public funds; a congressional candidate, something like half a million.

The second simple reform is this: Eliminate all other campaign rules for candidates who choose not to go the public-funding route. Forgoing public money, candidates would be free to raise as much money from as many individuals as they chose, without having to conceal this effort through ruses, technicalities, and front groups. This deregulation would fulfill a long-standing wish of many conservatives. The only "reform" burden on the candidates would be the obligation to disclose quickly and completely where the money had come from (story, Page 56).

This "two track" plan would make the currently tangled and murky campaign finance system clean and comprehensible by giving candidates and voters a clear choice. Candidates could run on public money and be freed from the daily dialing for dollars that has turned today's politicians into full-time beggars and extortionists. Or they could run on private money and be prepared to list the donors publicly--but otherwise not bother with the half-truths and hairsplitting of current campaign finance laws.

Candidates who chose the private-money route would have to recognize its political hazards. Candidate Smith would be free to take, say, $1 million from tobacco companies. But her opponent, publicly funded candidate Jones, would be free to charge that Smith can't be trusted to protect the public health. Voters would then have a clear choice. If in the end they still pull for Smith--well, that's democracy.

Currently, voters presume that virtually all candidates are in hock to special interests, except perhaps for megawealthy individuals such as Ross Perot and Steve Forbes, who can afford not to be "bought." Under the two-track system, billionaire candidates wouldn't be the only ones who could choose to occupy this high ground.

Stronger parties. In any given election there will probably be more private than public money available to candidates. But that doesn't necessarily mean that in specific races privately funded candidates will always outspend publicly funded ones. A candidate who chose the public-funding route could not personally raise more private money; but in this system the national party could raise private money--again without limits--and use it to support its candidates, public- and private-route alike. The parties would become clearinghouses for private donations and would spend to help public-route candidates in close contests against deep-pocketed, privately financed opponents. This, in turn, would strengthen the parties, a goal political scientists have endorsed for two generations.

Yes, allowing this exception for the parties is reminiscent of the "soft" party money that led to the Clinton scandal. But remember: Trying to limit private contributions is a fool's game that confuses more than it clarifies. If wealthy individuals and lobbies can't give directly to politicians or parties, they will just go outside the system. They'll exercise their free-speech rights and run ad blitzes of their own via countless independent "issue groups" that will be far less comprehensible and accountable to the public than parties are today.

Filtering donations through the party would weaken (though not break) the hold that special interests have over candidates when they fund campaigns directly. This is illustrated in the current fund-raising scandal by the seeming absence of policy "quid pro quos" between donors and the Clinton White House. Democratic Party officials shamelessly lobbied the White House on behalf of dubious donors such as the oil pipeline promoter Roger Tamraz. But the White House felt independent enough of party officials to largely ignore their entreaties. Tamraz got face time with the president but not the pipeline deal he coveted.

The two-track approach would have its biggest impact at the congressional level, where the influence of monied interests is traditionally most powerful. On presidential campaigns, which are already partially publicly funded, its effect would be more modest but still real. It would strip away the baffling legalisms that have helped administrations like Clinton's change the subject from what is ethical to what is legal ("Our lawyers said we could rent out the Lincoln Bedroom, so what's your beef?").

Ironically, two-tracking is opposed by both the left and the right precisely because it fuses the pet causes of both sides to form an idea that sits squarely in the radical center. The right loves campaign finance deregulation but loathes public financing. The left loves public financing but despises deregulation. Neither side realizes--yet--that by combining their remedies you get something more powerful than either alone. You get a relatively simple, comprehensible system that lets voters decide for themselves how much private money is too much.