How Clean Do We Want Politics to Be?
Publicly financed elections sound nice, but political campaigns usually find ways to evade the rules.
Editorial, Commentary
'CLEAN MONEY," LIKE SO MANY political reforms, is appealing
in the abstract but can be troublesome in the particulars.
In theory, this version of campaign finance reform relieves
office-seekers of the need to go hat in hand to (take your
pick) developers, labor unions, tobacco companies or other
interests to beg for the tens of thousands of dollars it
takes to run a campaign. No more endless evenings on the
phone asking for money and being pressured to offer
something in return. Instead, there is public funding of
campaigns. To the public â€" again, in the
abstract â€" this offers candidates unbought by
professional fundraisers, lobbyists or their clients,
untied to would-be government contractors.
They love clean-money campaigning in Arizona and in Maine,
where such programs were adopted and are weathering early
challenges. In California, the Los Angeles City Council is
grappling with a public-financing measure â€"
still far from final form â€" that could reach
the ballot as early as March. In November, voters statewide
will consider Proposition 89, a public-financing initiative
placed on the ballot by the California Nurses Assn.
Not coincidentally, positions on the subject locally have
crystallized. In the City Council, some members who
previously were all for "clean money" have discovered that
they don't like anything about it, including the name,
because it implies that traditional campaign financing is
dirty. So the council voted to get rid of the term. But the
subject is still on the table.
It's important to understand some basics about clean
â€" uh, about the "money formerly known as
clean." For one, it's not free. The money must come from
somewhere, like a new tax. Also, it's voluntary. Candidates
could still collect donations, but their opponents could
get public funding to keep pace with such fundraising.
What about independent expenditures â€" the
bottomless reserves of money that special interests can
pump into an election as long as they're not coordinated
with a campaign? They would still exist. It's precisely
these kind of expenditures that dominate discussions of
campaign finance reform today â€" and they are
creatures of the spending limits imposed in the
post-Watergate era. What's next?
Political money is a lot like toothpaste in a tube: You can
screw on the cap tightly, but if you keep squeezing, the
toothpaste will burst out the bottom. In the same way,
special interest money will burst through the regulations
and find its way to a candidate. New solutions will bring
new problems. The question for voters, as they begin
studying the details of the proposals, is whether trying to
limit the power of political money is worth the effort.
See the article on Los Angeles Times website