I’ve raised money for candidates myself, and I’ve given money to
candidates. And you know what? I hate it. I feel like I’m suckered into
a game that I know is heavily slanted against me, and whose rules have
nothing to do with anything I value. In short, it’s a shakedown — I’m
paying protection money so that maybe someone will actually pay
attention to what I care about. (That’s why I hate all the supposed
candidate-evaluation-by-dollars that occurs on this blog and others;
sure, it’s relevant to who wins, but it ain’t no-how relevant to what’s
good for us. )
And so we’re left with the current sad state of our party. The
Democrats are trapped playing a money game which is designed for them
to lose. For a party that’s generally disposed to equality of
opportunity and the good of many instead of a few, there’s simply no
way to compete with those that have a lot and wish to keep it. But,
Dems in office are disinclined to change the game, since after all,
it’s worked well enough for them. These Dems must understand that their
days are numbered: You can continue with the current system and resign
yourselves to permanent minority status, or to the prospect that a
moneyed candidate can threaten your seat.
Or you can decide not to play the game at all.
US Reps Barney Frank (D-Newton) and David Obey (D-WI) will propose a
campaign finance bill which would provide for all congressional
elections. Now, some conservatarian sorts may object to either the use
of taxpayer funds for races, or to the civil liberties aspect of
restricting campaign giving. As for the latter, in spite of Buckley vs.
Vallejo, I think it’s pretty clear that Money Is Not Speech. It used to
be said that “for freedom of the press, you need a press”, but that’s
certainly not true now, if it ever was. Speech happens, regardless of
who’s paying for it, if anyone.
As a taxpayer issue… come on. Within reason, this has got to be a
slam-dunk in favor of taxpayers. <a
href=”http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/01/29/congressional_pet_projects_boom____in_secret/”>Look
at earmarking — $27.3 billion worth. Do you think this would
happen at this scale without the influence of campaign cash? How about
our insanely wasteful prescription drug bill (<a
href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9328-2005Feb8.html”>$1.2
trillion — with a “T” — over ten years)? <a
href=”http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/22/MNG45CDDBS1.DTL”>Subsidies
for oil drilling ($8.1 billion in tax breaks alone)? I would
genuinely love to hear from conservatives as to whether they think all
that is money well spent. (Peter Porcupine, you out there? Bruce?
rightmiddleleft?) I have to think that without the largely-hidden
influence of campaign cash, we’d get smaller, more efficient government.
Now, many are skeptical as to whether campaign finance laws work:
- All that money’s got to go someplace, right? It’ll just end up on
the airwaves, just as independently produced ads that will propagandize
all of us into a docile Borg. - And heck, McCain-Feingold didn’t change anything anyway, right?
Now, #1 is partly true. The money will go someplace — hopefully “into
the sunlight”. If moneyed interests are buying their influence through
public discussion of their issues, that’s a net gain in comparison to
bribes made directly to politicians, out of the public view. As it
always has been, it will be up to a strong, independent press and a
well-informed electorate to make sense of the content of such
propaganda. More work for us, no question, but I like the odds of good
policy better under those circumstances.
#2 is false, in my opinion. I actually think there has been a move of
the political center of gravity back to the grassroots, possibly as a
result of McCain-Feingold. The problem for those of us on the left is
that not only does the right have more money, it’s better organized,
too, due to the “social capital” of the religious right. It’ll always
be hard for us to compete on money; but <a
href=”http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/01/20/dukakis_urges_democrats_to_return_to_their_roots/”>there’s
no excuse for not being
organized.
Think of publicly-funded campaigns as a security system for our budget
against looting by special interests. Yes, it costs money up front, but
at least you don’t lose the store.
I not only support public financing, I actively advocate for it. I agree that raising money for candidates is a necessary but distorting aspect of politics and we’d be much better off without it. Every candidate I’ve raised money for (Howard Dean, Pat Jehlen, Claire Naughton, Jesse Gordon, etc.), supports public financing, so at least I can feel that I’m helping raise money in order to end the need to raise money for candidates in the future. In fact, I’m on the campaign of the very guy (John Bonifaz) who sued our legislature when Finneran tried to get out of funding candidates in 2002.
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So I agree with most of this post. But I hate the headline.
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A line like that, on a political web site, currently, very clearly refers to the Abramoff scandal. Reading the text of your post shows that in this particular case, you didn’t actually mean “it” to refer to the Abramoff scandal, but it’s still clear that you used that line because you knew that’s what people would assume you meant, and that the connection you’re making is explicit. But the fact is, the Abramoff scandal is not bipartisan, and it is also not the same as the more general problem with money for candidates.
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So I’ll answer with a quotation from Krugman’s recent column:
Why does the insistence of some journalists on calling this one-party scandal bipartisan matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isnât. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory.
More important, this kind of misreporting makes the public feel helpless. Voters who are told, falsely, that both parties were drawn into Mr. Abramoffâs web are likely to become passive and shrug their shoulders instead of demanding reform.
Please don’t support that sort of misreporting by making statements that reinforce their message, or by blurring the line between the general issues of money & politics and the egregious abuses of the Abramoff scandal.
Well, I was being deliberately provocative with the headline. But you know, the principle that our system runs on legalized bribery is more important than any partisan consideration, frankly. Abramoff was merely the worst example of what is a bipartisan problem, although he himself is a Republican partisan, of course.
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So, tough luck. I think the Dems can and ought to do a hell of a lot more to try to end the current corrupt system.
Yes, the Democrats ought to do a lot more about this – and I think if they regain control of Congress, they very well may. And here in Massachusetts, we need to do a lot more about it too. Which means you, too: Have you campaigned for a pro-public-financing candidate lately? This problem really isn’t going to be fixed until people who care about and write about it also do about it, and that means running for office or helping someone who is running win (by going door to door, joining their phonebanks, or volunteering on election day).
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But no, Abramoff was not “merely the worst example of what is a bipartisan problem”, and that’s the point I’m trying to make about the headline. I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the scandal, that’s being pushed by the right wing. They want us to think that this is just another instance of the sort of thing that happens all the time. It’s not. It’s bigger, more integrated, and has some new elements, that make it much more far reaching than anything we’ve seen.
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Calling it another instance of the same problem is like saying that computers just do the same things humans can do, only faster. Some differences are so important that what started as quantitative, turns out to be qualitative. The Democrats didn’t try to do what the Abramoff-DeLay-Norquist-K-Street-etc. axis tried to do, and the Democrats didn’t achieve anything like it through any other means.
The Congressional Democrats did their part, back when they were in power, to stop real campaign finance reform
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I think the discusion whether the K street project is different in degree or kind than what the Dems were defending in 1993 is frankly not that interesting. The system of bribery and shakedowns is the same. You pay for a pol, you bought a pol. Period.
I view the Abramoff scandal as a tremendous opportunity for the Dems to do the right thing and get well-deserved political credit for it. Unfortunately, I’m not really sure they’re up to the task. They’ll have to prove it by being unanimously supportive of the reforms that Obey and Frank have proposed.
I’m all for public funding of national campaigns, and I agree that the current practice of lobbyists paying for face time leads to abuses. All well and good.
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That said, your post misses the point. What Abramoff, Delay, Ney, Doolittle, and likely many others are accused of extend well beyond the kind of greasy legislative quid pro quo that characterizes lobbyist-driven governance. They include fraud, bribery, and money laundering.
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These things are not “shady lobbying practices”. They are crimes. The people involved in them are, to my knowledge, ALL Republicans. NO Democrats.
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I’d love to see the influence of lobbyists reduced or even eliminated in federal, state, and local government. That isn’t, or isn’t primarily, what is on the table with Abramoff et al.
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Abramoff is a criminal. Delay, Ney, Doolittle, possibly Norquist, and others, are alleged criminals. No Dems in that list.
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Thanks