Capitol Ideas: Politics Comes Cheap
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell Politics Comes Cheap T he most important item on the Beltway agenda this year is the increased regulation of political speech. An early indicator was the four-part...
...the politicians enjoy cozy relationships with fat cats, etc...
...Does it surprise him that opponents are willing to spend a few million to elect someone who takes a more responsible view of the people's business...
...That's a pretty dark day, to compare this process with bubble gum or yogurt...
...The cost at both the congressional and presidential levels is obscene...
...But it's a pollster's fantasy to imagine that there is something real out there called voter sentiment on the arcane topic of campaign financing...
...But their stories strategically omitted the key information needed to conclude that the amounts of money really are excessive...
...They were proposing to change the First Amendment, yet no murmur was heard from the press...
...The court also acknowledged that rich people can spend as much of their own money as they like...
...It was found that we had no "national energy policy," so the Department of Energy was created...
...We only need to abolish the controls that already exist...
...The basic problem is that the cost of conducting a campaign for federal office has been bid up to a point that is destructive of the very democratic process it is said to represent," the Washington Post editorialized in April...
...Total PAC contributions in federal elections, 1993-1994: $189 million...
...By contrast, $4.5 billion was spent on potato chips...
...Strange New Lott For supporting the Chemical Weapons Treaty, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott won the 1997 Strange New Respect Award...
...He can veto or redirect hundreds of billions of dollars a year...
...They think it is synonymous with the Constitution...
...But there's another angle to this story: the media's own interest...
...An early indicator was the four-part series in the Washington Post in February ("The Fund Raising Frenzy of Campaign '96...
...Cost of producing the 1995 movie Water-world, $18o million...
...The amounts now being spent on federal elections were "unbridled," "freewheeling," or "unconstrained," they said...
...I hear people say we spend more on yogurt or bubble gum than on politics," said Sen...
...These reforms have forced candidates to devote so much time to fundraising that a real headache has been created...
...Leading Democrats have started to call for constitutional changes to get around what the New York Times calls the "disastrous decision" of the Supreme Court (in 1976...
...Total amount spent on education per year in the U.S: $65o billion...
...The journalists who write stories with headlines such as "The System Cracks Under the Weight of Cash" (Ruth Marcus and Charles R. Babcock of the Washington Post) don't give us these figures...
...The level of debate here is low indeed...
...The man's mind has gone...
...Recognizing that political speech is a First Amendment issue — indeed one of the most important—the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the communication of opinions about political issues is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be restricted...
...Cost of Michael Huffington's 1994 campaign for Senate seat in California: $29 million...
...Being a U.S...
...If they forswore any further redistribution, then no doubt we could enjoy a moderate politics restricted to the functions set forth in the Constitution...
...Wendell Ford did Kentucky and the nation a favor last month by announcing his retirement...
...for Rupert Murdoch, and "TV advertising" for "full page ad" and you get the picture...
...As mass communication is impossible without large expenditures, the law inevitably restricts political speech...
...According to Cato, "total political spending for all local, state and federal races and ballot issues is approximately o.o5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, only slightly more than what was spent zo years ago...
...The press normally flourish the First Amendment in our faces as a crucifix before vampires...
...price controls...
...Liberals don't mind that at all...
...He needs $5 million to get himself re-elected in Connecticut, but is sore because he will have to collect it one small donor at a time...
...New limits on campaign finances, such as those advocated by Senators McCain, Thompson, Feingold, and Wellstone, would effectively reduce the diffusion of political information from independent (i.e., paid) sources such as advertising...
...Editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, the major television networks, and a mostly Democratic collection of politicians, have construed soft money and PAC expenditures as mere circumventions of their good intentions...
...They want to outlaw any organized response to their own organized larceny...
...It is a general rule in Washington that interference with markets in the name of reform will create new problems and therefore calls for more reform...
...Add the amounts to be spent in the next three years, and the total outlays by the federal machine before the next presidential election will exceed $7 trillion...
...Chris Dodd...
...If Rupert Murdoch, who owns a newspaper, wishes to use it to support an incumbent, he may do so without limit," she said...
...He has Watergate to thank...
...Even though the big items such as Social Security and Medicare will remain largely unchanged whoever wins the White House, the president exercises considerable influence over expenditures...
...The presentation was made by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger of the New York Times...
...Political Action Committees may give up to $5,000...
...The New York Times even pretended to measure public sentiment about the likelihood of its passage (small...
...In contrast, total spending by the federal government this year will be $1,650 billion...
...But if a wealthy individual wishes to contribute the cost of a full page ad on behalf of the challenger in order to balance the newspaper's coverage, the law prohibits her from doing so...
...I do not relish, in fact I detest, the idea of having to raise $5 million for a job that pays $133,000 a year," he said...
...This was perhaps the most amazing non-barking dog in my years of observing the Washington scene...
...Annual sales of Barbie Doll line: $1 billion...
...He must know that the job's value and his remuneration are unrelated...
...The current hullabaloo about the cost of elections was a byproduct of reforms enacted after Watergate...
...But if there was any rejoinder to Gephardt and Romer I did not hear it...
...The problem is that he thinks the people's business involves spending trillions of the people's money...
...A porn site on the World Wide Web cannot be regulated in any way, but set up your own "Vote for Al Gore" site on the Web, or print your own bumper stickers and spend over $250 doing so, and you are subject to FEC reporting requirements...
...Democratic Party Chairman Roy Romer said that spending money to advance a political conviction "is a constitutional right, but we've got to find a way to limit it...
...So they seek a new round of more Draconian reforms...
...Columnists then ventriloquize back these pollster-fabricated opinions...
...And yet the two main contenders for this office spent a quarter of a billion dollars in their most recent quadrennial contest...
...Hence issue advertising, a rising number of millionaires in the Senate, and Steve Forbes on the presidential hustings...
...He congratulated Lott for "refusing to second-guess the decisions already made by the State Department and the international community...
...Tobacco and whiskey interests would have been happy to finance his election, but the spirit of reform has outlawed that...
...The good news is that ABC's "World News Tonight" with Peter Jennings lost 12 percent of its audience in the last year alone...
...The public clearly wants reform," says David Broder...
...No one has the foggiest idea about these things...
...Faced with a similar task, Sen...
...We gladly bid him adieu...
...Thanks to columnist George Will for that one...
...I es true, as many journalists have reported, that the present system helps incumbents...
...Ford was a sponsor of the Motor Voter law,allowing welfare recipients to register in welfare offices...
...Their influence would increase as their competition was restricted...
...They want to be able to take and redistribute money politically without having to deal with a rational response from its present possessors or its potential acquirers...
...He was the one who raised the money issue...
...Dominating the culture means never having to provide evidence for your beliefs...
...Normally they bark fiercely whenever they see any threat to it—and rightly so...
...18 June 1997 • The American Spectator through December 1996 was $232 million...
...The problem is that the consequence of politics— increasingly its whole purpose—is the capture of billions of dollars of real money and its redistribution to favored recipients...
...N. 20 June 1997 • The American Spectator...
...Senator Lott's request that reporters be barred from the ceremony, held in Katharine Graham's dining room, was respected...
...The following amusing comparisons come from the Cato Institute's 1997 Handbook for Congress...
...House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt said this year: "What we have is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy...
...Amount budgeted by Sony Music International to promote the latest Michael Jackson CD: $30 million...
...Here are some relevant figures...
...Common Cause rules of engagement would then suffice...
...Again, unintended consequences...
...Surprisingly enough Nadine Strossen, the president of the ACLU, which opposes limits on campaign contributions, drew attention to what is really going on here...
...Meanwhile the autonomy of the regular news media would be untouched...
...The total amount spent by the Clinton and Dole campaigns from January 1995 Campaign reform is designed to keep government big...
...Total congressional campaign spending in the 1993-1994 cycle: $724 million...
...By way of background: the Federal Elections Campaign Act of 1974 limited individual campaign contributions to $1,000, an amount not adjusted for inflation since (the indexed amount would now be $3,300...
...The unanticipated revival of the political parties is another...
...Because unlimited "soft" money can be channeled to the parties for television ads, as long as they don't urge voting for specific candidates, they have found a new role as the brokers of TV advertising...
...But the liberals don't want that...
...The classic case was the energy crisis, created by TOM BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...So their sagging control over the dissemination of political information would be bolstered...
...Their good-government smokescreen has been the disparagement of excess...
...We don't need new campaign-finance limits...
...The total amount spent on elections to fill 476 federal offices in 1996 was $2.6 billion...
...senator, he added, has become "a job of raising money to be re-elected instead of a job doing the people's business...
...Substitute New York Times et al...
...Their whole tendency is to think of politics as something that should be immune from market forces—played out, ideally, in a forum organized by Common Cause, with no candidate enjoying any monetary advantage over another...
...Seven reporters filled nine pages of the paper...
...Of this, $113 million was spent on advertising, mostly on television...
...Here's one more: Total political spending in the United States in the 1991-1992 election cycle, including federal, state, and local elections: $3.2 billion...
...Instead, newspapers commission and publish their own misleading polls, contriving to teach us anew the lessons of the 1970's: "The system is broken" and can't be fixed...
Vol. 30 • June 1997 • No. 6
