Public Financing or Die

As I researched the potential impact of Boren's bill on Democratic prospects, I quickly learned that trying to come up with a national formula that was fair to candidates in all states was not going to be easy. For example, at the time, there were no major TV stations in the state of New Jersey: if you were a NJ candidate, you had to buy TV time from stations in New York City, or Philadelphia, time that was much more expensive, in terms of potential voters reached, because you were having to pay ad rates based on all those viewers in New York or PA who couldn't vote for you.

The metaphor from those days that has stuck with me every since was thinking about campaign finance reform as squeezing a balloon filled with water (oil might be a more apt fluid). You could put pressure on one part of the balloon, and be quite successful at forcing the fluid out of the section of the ballon you were squeezing. But the fluid didn't go away, it just buldged out somewhere else.

The fundamental difficulty with the last few decades of struggle over campaign finance reform is that there is a grand lie, a deceit, at the center of the struggle, a lie which all parties--candidates, electeds, editorial writers--all accept. No one gives candidates money without some faint hope that the candidate will be indebted to the donor, and therefore more receptive, more appreciative, of the donor's interests, whatever those interests may be. Because income and wealth are unequally distributed, such a system is not just ripe for corruption, it is born corrupt.

The simple fact that we use the term "campaign contributions" for what is so obviously criminal bribery makes me wonder sometimes why we bother going through all the charades that we go through to pretend that there is anything remotely democratic, moral, or legal, about how politicians raise money.

The creation of the Federal Election Commission after Nixon and Agnew was supposed to show that we could create federal bureaucrats who could distinguish between "good" money and "bad" money, as opposed to tackling the problem head on with public financing. The FEC has always been a toothless tiger, never more so than recently, when there are not even enough commissioners to hold a quorum.

Has anyone asked Obama or Clinton about public financing? Obama's done a great job mobilizing small donors online. More small donors is better than fewer big donors, assuming that the act of donating even $10 leaves the donor more engaged in the political process than he/she would otherwise have been. But Obama's got his billionaire bundlers who are bringing in tens of millions too.

If we are every going to deal with the political depravity of allowing corporations to control public policy through (legalized) bribery, we have to provide public financing for all campaigns. (All campaigns: I have been especially alarmed lately by stories about how corporations and right-wing groups are playing increasingly large roles in the elections of judges; that people tolerate judges being elected is again one of those arrangements that boggle the mind. How could anything be more corrupting of the rule of law than the dependence of judges on campaign contributions?)