Editorials

...Senator Sarbanes managed to win, in spite of smear and slander, but only by himself raising and spending a small fortune, and it is suggested that one answer to such PAC negative campaigns is for Congress to mandate free television and radio time for the victim to respond to all charges against him...

...Proliferating like rabbits, they have poured far more money into political campaigns than has ever been spent before...

...Educational standards are too often ignored, student athletes are crassly exploited, and illegal recruiting practices are now standard features of revenue-producing sports programs at many colleges and universities...

...WE'RE ONLY QUOTING Well, they said it...

...Walker also start to look on sports as a business, who can blame them...

...In the abstract there is nothing essentially wrong with the idea of PACs...

...Already there are more than three thousand PACs, as compared with barely over a hundred in 1972...

...In really scandalous cases the exploited student athlete-often, like Mr...

...Revenue-producing sports have become big business for many colleges and universities, with the take from television rights and stadium revenues an important part of their budget...

...As they point out, the banking industry's political efforts make it one of the nation's most significant political contributors...

...And raising the amount individuals can contribute to political campaigns with tax deductibility would have the good effect of strengthening the role of the political parties now weakened by the PACs...

...The situation was complicated by the fact that Mr...

...Given a chance at big television money, it is hard for a school to resist temptation, and much of the top-name sports structure rests on the backs of plantation field hands technically known as students...

...The size of the popular outpouring has clearly scared Congress - more than 300 out of the 435 members of the House and more than half of the senators signed up as co-sponsors of the amendment to the jobs bill that would have repealed the interest/dividends withholding measure...

...24, 1982 issue, big-time college athletics are in a scandalous state...

...But the suspicion will not down that lurking behind the banking industry's success with Congress lies the undeniably difficult problem of the political action committees...

...Perhaps the best way to sum the matter up is to cite the quote in Time magazine from Democratic Representative Thomas Downey of New York's Long Island: "You can't buy a Congressman for $5,000 (the most a single PAC can give to one candidate...

...has said it will abide by the same self-regulation...

...In the Senate, Donald W. Riegle Jr., a senior Democrat on the Banking Committee and a leading opponent of withholding, took in $82,207 - the highest amount of any member of Congress although only five percent of Senator Riegle's reelection effort...

...Representative Fernand J. St...

...Later another attempt was made to attach a similar amendment to the social security bill...

...But the heart of any answer to the PAC problem is public financing for congressional campaigns...

...Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah must be the biggest PAC-man of them all...

...This caused a considerable brouhaha, but eventually he decided to go ahead with the pros...

...A NEW KIND OF PAC YOUR FRIENDLY neighborhood banker plus all his big brothers has managed to see that Congress was deluged with a flood of letters, all protesting the law making a ten percent withholding on interest and dividends mandatory...

...But as new kid on the block scrapping for big TV money, it needs stars in the worst way-and so it promptly broke its own rule against signing underclassmen, luring Herschel Walker into a three-year contract at, would you believe, a million and a half a year-a sum that makes Mr...

...The only trouble with this is that sitting legislators would have to vote for legislation which might benefit a future challenger to their seats...

...He is, or was, the outstanding star of the University of Georgia powerhouse football team, a star who catapulted himself into ineligibility by signing a professional contract with the United States Football League...

...the U.S.F.L...

...Germain is chairman of the House Banking Committee and a leading opponent of tax withholding...

...They are committees set up by corporations, unions, trade associations, and organizations of like-minded people to lobby for particular political causes, surely a legitimate part of the democratic process...

...Just short of 1500 corporate PACs made total contributions of $30,000,000, while 350 union PACs came up with $20,000,000...

...Walker, a black-emerges from college after years of total athletic participation almost illiterate and with nothing but scars to show for his efforts...

...In fact, the PACs have simply got out of hand...

...The interests of doctors and hospitals are well looked after in Congress...

...Such measures would help...

...How better to begin to repair that omission than by a comment on the case of Herschel Walker, and where better for that to appear than in an Education Issue...

...Granted, withholding on interest and dividends is a hot issue, as the mail indicates, and again there is no reason to say that these men would not have taken the stand they did if there were no PAC banking money...

...Adds the published record of the festivities: "[Laughter and applause.]"ter and applause...

...he was on the receiving end of $750,000 from assorted PACs...

...Walker's side...

...Mail from constituents accounts for a good deal of the support the banks are getting on this issue...

...Big money is involved...

...It's easy enough, then, to see that PACs pose a growing problem for the American system of representative democracy...

...the American Medical Association invested $2,400,000 in the 1982 congressional elections...

...If it could be managed, that would be a PAC to bank on...

...As was discovered after passage of the current campaign-financing laws, reformers must beware unforeseen pitfalls...

...Presidential primary campaigns are now only partially financed through private money, including PACs, and the final and crucial race itself is publicly financed...

...In short, what may be called for in this case is not a corporate PAC or a union PAC or a trade association PAC but a great people's political action committee - in other words, a Pop-PAC...

...As Mark Naison pointed out in an article in our Sept...

...according to the New York Times he received $53,150 - more than a fifth of the total campaign contributions for his 1982 campaign...

...Thus in the last election Maryland's Democratic Senator Paul Sarbanes was the target of a $650,000 negative campaign mounted against him by the National Conservative Political Action Committee, known as Nickpac, which in 1980claimed credit for defeating Democratic Senators George McGovern of South Dakota, Frank Church of Idaho, Birch Bayh of Indiana, and John Culver of Iowa...

...Haloes being in short supply in Congress, this will require a popular mail and telegram campaign even greater than that mounted by the banks on the withholding issue...

...Given the present situation, what price amateurism...

...But you can buy his vote...

...The dominant National Football League has made it official policy to let the colleges nurture football talent for four years before signing them up...

...And if a million and a half dollars a year seems like a lot for a man to carry a pigskin once a week, well, that's another question and another editorial...

...But wouldn't they and the rest of us feel more comfortable if they could say they had not taken a dime from the banking industry...

...The president was introduced by syndicated columnist Joseph Sob-ran in the following manner: "Mr...

...at a party thrown by National Review to introduce Washington to the conservative journal's new Washington editor, John McLaughlin, a man who in an earlier existence as a Jesuit and a speechwriter for Richard Nixon was known as the conservatives' answer to Father Drinan...

...What is not so easy is to see exactly what to do about them, although there is currently some sentiment in Congress to try...

...This sounds fair enough on first hearing...

...President, we have the deepest faith in your character and determination, but we want you to know that should you ever falter, should you ever have a moment of weakness or, Heaven forbid, compassion, John is here to support you, to back you up, to keep you the same rigid, supply-side, free-market, Red-baiting ideologue we have come to know and love...

...No one can say any member of Congress would not have sided with the banks on this issue if they had not received PAC banking money, but it is hard to believe the contributions hurt in what Senator Bob Dole, Republican aspirant for the presidency and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, called the "most massive campaign in history to intimidate Congress...

...Walker is...

...If candidates are simply limited in their access to PAC or other campaign-financing, will we see an even greater proliferation of millionaire candidates who come close to buying their seats outright...

...Despite the $5,000 limit on what an individual PAC can give to one candidate, there is no limit on what a PAC can spend on a negative campaign, as long as there is no direct link between it and the candidate it seeks to benefit...

...The U.S .F.L...

...Almost overlooked in the confusion caused by the banking campaign against the measure was the fact that this was not a new tax imposed on anyone, as many imagined, but a withholding of tax that is owed anyway and in too many cases is being evaded at a cost to the government that runs into the billions - and at the expense of other taxpayers who pay their fair share...

...Then there is the problem of the so-called "negative" campaigns of smear and slander...

...How important were bank PAC contributions...

...This legislation, among their other things, put limits on what individuals could contribute to federal candidates...

...In 1976, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to limit what an individual or his family could invest in a campaign...

...Walker by far the highest paid player in the history of professional football...

...Many of these letters were based on misleading advertising by the banks...

...Congressional races would benefit from the same solution...

...Why shouldn't Herschel Walker sign to play football for money instead of "fun" before a possible injury permanently sidelines him...

...For those of you who depend on journals like this one to give you vital information and thus don't know, we should tell you who Mr...

...Honoring the party by his presence was Ronald Reagan...

...FOR THE SPORT OF IT We can't remember when we ran an editorial on the sporting scene-which surely means that we are neglecting a large sliceof American life...

...An obvious reform that should be enacted speedily is to put a top limit - say $75,000 - on the amount of PAC money any one candidate can receive...

...This provision in turn promoted political action committees which pool the contributions of smaller donors, from union members and doctors and lawyers to trade associations and corporations...

...If students like Mr...

...It's done on a regular basis...

...There are more than four hundred PACs organized by banking and savings institutions, and ninety percent of the members of Congress received money from them in the past two years, although the author of the amendment to kill withholding did not...

...Our sympathies are all on Mr...

...He is now officially ineligible to play with any college or university team, and heated denunciations have been leveled at him inside and outside of Georgia ever since for his perfidy in giving up his amateur status...

...Upholders of the withholding measure say that large contributions from the banking PACs are a major factor in the repeal effort...

...Walker changed his mind after initially signing his contract, and denied to reporters that he had signed...

...House GOP leader Robert Michel of Illinois, for example, received more than $200,000 from various PACs for his last campaign - and at that he just managed to beat his relatively unknown contender...

...In a way quite unintended PACs received their big impetus from the reform laws of the 1970s...

...is a fledgling operation that is determined to prevent the country from forgetting about football for a few months after Superbowl Sunday...