Clean Money The Way To Reform Elections
By Susan Lerner, Executive Director CA Clean Money Campaigns
No one likes our current system of campaign finance.
Elected officials and candidates are burdened by incessant
fundraising and don't like being viewed with the frequent
suspicion of engaging in pay-to-play politics. Donors feel
extorted, with no choice but to keep writing larger and
larger checks.
Corporations and unions are locked into an ever-increasing
spiral of tit-for-tat escalating campaign contributions.
Even most lobbyists don't like it because, sooner or later,
they are on the wrong side of the question "Do I have the
most campaign cash or does my opposition?"
If you talk to the voters, well, they have plenty to say.
Poll after poll shows that almost 75 percent of
Californians believe that "a few special interests"
dominate Sacramento.
And yet, no one can stop the machine and get off the
merry-go-round. And who can blame them? Conventional
campaign-finance-reform measures, while sometimes helping
around the edges, make it more complicated to run and
harder to raise money. The problem with trying to simply
limit campaign contributions is obvious: As long as private
contributions are the currency of politics, people will
find a way around the limits. Just look at the steady
procession of paid-in-full junkets that our elected
officials of both parties take to destinations around the
world. The problem isn't the trips, it's who pays for
them.
Today, for all practical purposes, government is owned by
the corporations, unions and large contributors who
bankroll election campaigns, junkets and shareholder
accounts. These special interests understand that campaign
contributions are an investment. They expect--and
receive--a return. Everyone involved in politics has their
own favorite instance of the outsized government giveaway.
Talk to Republicans and they will claim outrageous benefits
handed out to unions. Democrats will regale you with horror
stories of outrageous amounts of tax breaks and regulatory
loopholes handed out to corporations. These stories have
become so pervasive that the public has become inured to
them, feeding a general dissatisfaction with government and
elected officials.
That general dissatisfaction comes from the voters'
understanding that they no longer own or control
government, because those who invest campaign dollars do,
instead. In a certain sense, the current system is only
fair. It vests the power in those who care enough in
government to voluntarily invest in it with their money.
But the returns on private contributions come out of the
taxpayer's pocket. And that's not how it should be.
Shouldn't the public get the benefit of the return on their
tax dollars instead? There is an alternative: A voluntary
clean-money system for publicly funding election campaigns.
Since qualified candidates use public funds and aren't
allowed to use any private funds on their campaigns, they
are beholden only to the public and the voters. In other
words, the public reaps the benefit of campaign investments
instead of private contributors.
But clean money's benefits don't happen automatically. It
happens because the public understands that you only get a
return on an investment that you actually make and has
elected to make that investment.
Under a clean-money system, the public shares that
ownership with their elected officials. Freed from the
incessant rigors of constant campaign fundraising, elected
officials are more able to respond to constituents'
concerns, to make policy decisions based on policy
concerns, and to get more respect for doing their jobs
again.
There can't be any unilateral disarmament in
campaign-finance reform. But providing a viable
alternative, a voluntary system for publicly funding
campaigns like the clean-elections systems working Arizona
and Maine and now even with a bipartisan proposal at the
federal level, lets everyone stop at the same time and
allows control of government to rest where it belongs: in
the voters and their elected representatives.
In this season of discussions of bipartisan election
reform, the one area that is not receiving the attention it
is due is what James Canales of the Irvine Foundation in
last Friday's Sacramento Bee described as "[d]ecreasing the
need for and influence of money in the system." The kinds
of campaign-finance reforms that have been mentioned so far
are minor adjustments to the margins of our
campaign-finance system, not fundamental reform. They have
no chance of fundamentally changing ownership of our
government. Clean money, on the other hand, serves many of
the same goals that the redistricting and term limit
adjustment proposals address: more competitive races
leading to more responsive, effective and representative
elected officials. A well-crafted clean-money measure
should be part of the bipartisan reform package because
without it, the public still won't really own the election
process.
In addition, the Legislature has two opportunities this
session to shift control back into their own hands and the
hands of the voters. AB 583 (Hancock) would place a
measure setting up a voluntary system of full public
funding for all statewide and legislative offices on the
ballot. SB 536 (Simitian) would set up
clean-money public funding for Insurance Commissioner
races, an office where the perception of "ownership" by
the insurance industry is most damaging. It's time for
Californians to stop ceding the power of investing in
campaigns to special interests, and reassert control
over the government that was originally designed to
serve all. True progress towards clean-money reform is
an essential step toward this needed change.
Susan Lerner is executive director of the California Clean
Money Campaign.
See the article on Capitol Weekly website