POLITICS
Rethinking Campaign
Finance Reform
by Stump Connolly
Before the lull ends in this endless primary campaign, let’s take a
moment to think about what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have spent just
to get to this point.
The latest estimates put that at $400 million, about half the $800 million all the Republican and Democratic candidates have spent in the first three months of 2008 running for president.
In 2002, after a seven-year battle with the entrenched special interests in Washington, Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin put in place a “campaign finance reform” bill that was intended to stop this arms race in political spending.
The McCain-Feingold bill, defeated three times and passed only after the Senate voted 62-38 to break a filibuster, contained the following provisions: Individual contributors could give no more than $2,000 (up from $1,000) to a candidate in any election cycle. Soft money contributions to political parties to finance, for instance, their conventions and voter registration drives, would be banned. And the Federal Election Commission (FEC) charged with monitoring all this would have to produce more timely and detailed reports on who gave what to whom.
To keep political spending in check, the FEC also established guidelines for giving federal funds to candidates who agreed to limit their spending in state primaries. Candidates who agreed not to spend over $50 million this primary season were eligible for up to $21 million in federal campaign money; and party nominees who agree not to raise outside funds after the conventions this fall will receive another $84 million for the general election.
A Quaint Notion
In this most unusual political year, this formula for controlling campaign costs seems quaintly out of date. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama began their campaigns saying they would turn down federal financing; last February John McCain himself abandoned the spending limits he sponsored and fought so hard to pass.
When an Obama can raise $40 million over the Internet in March alone, the $21 million in promised federal funds is not much of a carrot. to abide by FEC limits. And when the election commission itself can’t even get a quorum together to decide the rules of the game, that’s not wielding much of a stick. As long as it remains lodged in the FEC, the argument over campaign finance reform is a theoretical discussion about what mush a toothless tiger must eat.
Activists in both the Republican and Democratic parties were never particularly fond of the McCain-Feingold bill. Conservatives claimed it was a restriction on their free speech (as expressed by money.) Liberals decried its limitations on bundling union money and other PAC contributors.
The ink was not yet dry on the bill when both sides took advantage of a loophole allowing “issue advocacy” groups organized under section 527 of the Internal Revenue Service code to raise and spend unlimited sums.
Thus were born such organizations as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and Harold Ickes’ Media Fund. Together, they spent $611 million in 2004, bring the overall cost of that presidential race up to $2.2 billion.
A Matter of Self Protection
The silver lining around the dark cloud of McCain-Feingold is that it forced the U.S. Supreme Court to reaffirm Congress’s right to limit the impact of money on elections.
“Many years ago we observed that to say that Congress is without power to pass appropriate legislation to safeguard . . . an election from the improper use of money to influence the result is to deny to the nation . . . the power of self protection,” Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and John Paul Stevens wrote in their 5-4 majority decision in 2003.
“We abide by that conviction in considering Congress’s most recent effort to confine the ill effects of aggregated wealth on our political system. We are under no illusion that (the law) will be the last congressional statement on the matter. Money, like water, will always find an outlet. What problems will arise, and how Congress will respond, are concerns for another day.”
The underlying facts that shaped the 2003 Supreme Court decision came from a congressional analysis of the 1996 election, when total presidential spending was a mere $630 million (including $234 in public financing.) The cost estimates for this year’s race start at $3 billion, and go up.
A Modest Proposal: FREE TV
The bulk of all this money goes toward television and radio advertising. Even in a new media environment where millions of dollars are being spent on internet ads and sophisticated field operations, the Project for Excellence in Journalism estimates that 72 percent of a candidate’s advertising dollars will be spent buying local TV ads and another 12 percent will go toward purchasing local radio time.
In the 2006 off-year elections, that amounted to $2.2 billion. This year, adding in a presidential race to House and Senate contests, CNN predicts political advertising on TV will reach $3 billion.
If the goal of campaign finance reform is to take away the influence of money on politics, why not start by taking away the need to spend 72 percent of that money buying advertising on our public airwaves?
Since 1934, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has used its licensing authority to set rules for private broadcasters. Under these rules, Howard Stern can be fined for making outrageous comments, programming inappropriate for children is confined to certain hours, stations are required to air public service announcements, and political candidates cannot be charged anything higher than the lowest advertising rate for their commercials.
What if the FCC were also to mandate that a condition for holding a broadcasting license is giving federal candidates FREE air time in certain periods of the day? We could call it The Public Service Hour and channel what is now a splatter board of negative TV spots into defined dayparts, just as the British do, where every candidate must make his or her best case.
This is not a far-fetched scenario. In 1996, no fewer than 200 public figures took out an ad in The New York Times endorsing “Free TV for Straight Talk.” They came from all parts of the political spectrum and included former network anchors Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Robert McNeil, Roger Mudd and Howard K. Smith; former Senators Alan Simpson, Bill Bradley and Paul Simon; and former Republican party chairman Frank Fahrenkopf and Mary Louise Smith and Democratic party chairmen Robert Straus, Paul Kirk and Charles Manatt.
Two years later, in his State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton vowed “to address the real reason for the explosion in campaign costs: the high cost of media advertising.”
“I will, for the folks watching at home, formally request that the Federal Communications Commission act to provide free or reduced-cost television time for candidates who observe spending limits voluntarily,” he told Congress, “The airwaves are a public trust, and broadcasters also have to help us in this effort to strengthen our democracy.”
Clinton’s resolve crumbled a few days later, along with the rest of his presidency, when a certain little blue dress worn by a White House intern turned up on the Drudge Report. But the president’s instincts were right; and his plan would have dampened the current fund-raising arms race.
While We’re At It, No Robocalls
Migrating the issue of how to control the influence of money in politics from the FEC to the FCC is not without problems. The countervailing argument to the 2003 Supreme Court decision is a 1976 case, Buckley vs. Valeo, in which the court ruled that while Congress can set limits on candidate fund-raising, setting limits on candidate spending is a violation of free speech rights.
That objection, however, has been muted by the explosion of other means candidates can use to get out their message. The internet, cable TV, direct mail, billboards and, yes, newspapers are all powerful ways to communicate a political message.
Candidate would be free to raise and spend as much money as they wish in these other media. But on the public airwaves, for the public good, they would have to tailor their message to fit in the free air time slots the FCC rules would prescribe.
And while the FCC is in the mood to get this clutter of political ads off the air, it could use its same powers in the telecommunications arena to let consumers put political robocallers on their DO NOT CALL list. I don’t think many of us will miss them.
Change vs. The Special Interests
The watchword on the campaign trail this year is bringing a “change” to Washington that will end the pervasive influence lobbyists have on the political process. That influence derives from the bundled contributions lobbyists for big oil, big pharma, big any industry can put together to help congressmen, senators and presidential candidates pay for their campaigns –– in exchange for little regulatory favors.
Reining in out of control TV political advertising – and replacing it with free air time – will be a good test of how sincere the candidates are. Because one of the biggest lobbying groups in Washington is the National Association of Broadcasters.
Its member stations, the media conglomerates who control them, and telecommunications giants like AT&T that now want to compete with them have so far contributed $54 million to political campaigns in the first three months of 2008.
Giving away air time, instead of selling it, won’t go down easy with this crowd. In some battleground states, during election season, political advertising can account for as much as 20 percent of a station’s revenues so broadcasters can be expected to put up the fight of their lives to protect that revenue source.
The rest of us, however, would probably welcome the respite. Not only would it drastically reduce the need for candidates to hit up every lobbying group in town to support their candidacy, but it would give us back our television sets so we can watch important things, like The Simpsons.
If the candidates mean what they say about taking on the special interests, they’ll have to do it one industry at a time, and broadcasting would be an interesting place to start.
No one said change comes easy.
