Campaign Financing: Four Views

...Wage earners, for example, are routinely denied rights to freedom of association and free speech on the job that wealth holders take for granted...

...Its mission would be to provide every candidate, of whatever party, a chance to state his or her case to the public...

...Most voters now feel like little more than consumers in a political marketplace, and consumer sovereignty is a feeble lever where the range of goods over which it is exercised is limited...

...First, the continuing growth of the population and of the scale of government has increased the required span of political representation to the point of overload—the ratio of voters to elected representatives in the United States is among the highest in the world...

...And, finally, they all require the assent of Congress, or some other group of sitting politicians who, among all the people in the nation, have the least interest in changing the system...

...Is such a thing feasible...

...Elected officials and party leaders had to be much more directly responsive to the felt needs and interests of that membership...

...It would not run candidates, though it would have to establish some threshold rules to determine who gets airtime and who doesn't...

...I don't see why not...

...None of the proposals for campaign finance reform addresses any of these problems...

...elected officials can attend to the concerns of everyone they are supposed to represent...

...10 • DISSENT...

...To change the way campaigns are conducted we have to put someone else in charge of producing them...

...After all, corruption has been a persistent concern to democrats since the beginning of the republic and yet for the most part each generation has somehow managed to muddle its way forward to a more democratic and more inclusive political system...

...Local party structures helped ordinary Americans feel much more connected to the political system than all the focus groups, talk shows, and town meetings now do—even though it may be the case that modern methods of polling give party leaders a much more nuanced view of public opinion...

...There is no way that U.S...

...Raise the money...

...The corruptSUMMER • 1997 • 7 Comments and Opinions ing influence of money on the political process has a part to play, but it is by no means the lead...

...The crisis of political representation is the cumulative effect of many factors...

...But a case could also be made that the networks would make a profit on the whole thing...

...We need to get citizens and the public interest back in it again...

...After all, people are much more likely to tune into something where the outcome is undetermined, and advertisers love an audience...

...The way to do that is for the grant-givers, reformers, pundits, and ex-office holders who claim to care about such things to put their energies and resources where their mouth is and create a nonprofit educational corporation—let's call it "The Real Campaign 2000"—that would immediately set about organizing the events of the next campaign to ensure the most open, the most free-ranging, the most probing discussion possible of all the candidates and issues...

...What we need are fairer, more open, and more freewheeling political campaigns—ways of ensuring a larger measure of public discussion and genuine political debate—without having to depend upon the incumbents themselves to give it to us...

...In effect, Real Campaign 2000 would function as the party of all parties, the guarantor of the electoral process as a whole, a new informal fourth branch of government...

...Naturally enough, the politicians represent the interests they know, and those excluded from the informal mechanisms that determine who gets listened to rightly feel betrayed and abandoned...

...So what to do...

...Finally, the rise of broadcast campaigning and celebrity politics has broken the institutional ties that once bound candidates to constituents in the established mass parties...

...Start the discussion...

...Second, most Americans are still not equal before the law...

...Get the airtime...

...Restricting the flow of political contributions or financing political campaigns with tax dollars will not ensure wage earners the equal protection of the law...

...Today's crisis of representation runs deeper than money...

...Campaign finance reform won't change the way the politicians conduct their campaigns...

...We don't need to take either money or the special interests out of politics...

...And the larger the effort, the more leverage the organizers will have in setting the ground rules...

...They will not alter the structure of representation, ensure equality before the law, or change the balance of power between incumbent politicians and the electorate...

...It will only change who pays for them...

...The networks might even be convinced to make airtime available at bargain basement rates in return for a greater role in deciding the content of the actual programming...

...And even the broadcast media are getting better at providing the public with what they need to know...

...Doing it on a nonprofit basis might make it easier to raise the money to finance the effort...

...All contributions would be tax deductible...

...From the run-up to the first primaries to the wind-down before elec8 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions tion day, the last presidential campaign was little more than a series of stage-managed photo opportunities intended to present the candidates talking to the right kinds of people against the most telling backgrounds...

...Changing the way campaigns are financed is neither sufficient nor even, most likely, necessary...

...In a few more years, nobody is going to be paying attention anyway...

...During the last campaign, television, radio, and on-line services offered access to a wide range of information about the various candidates and their positions...

...Such leverage is important if Real Campaign 2000 is not to be hostage to incumbents...

...But there was no effective way to appeal over the heads of precinct leaders to the voters themselves...

...Since the political parties have started producing media events, it seems perfectly fitting for the media to start producing political events...

...We don't have to wait for congressional approval...

...Moreover, if we can't change the way campaigns are conducted, I say let the special interests pay for them...

...And since the media love a good argument much more than a sitting politician does, they are much more likely to produce political events that might actually restore serious debate and discussion to the process...

...Indeed, it is little more than the logical extension of recent trends...

...The print media do a pretty good job of informing the active reading public and encouraging genuine political debate...

...If the media buy is large enough, the candidates will participate, if only to secure the free publicity or to forestall their opponents from getting a leg up on them...

...Too much of this information, however, was produced by the candidates themselves—or their consultants— and was, to say the least, self-serving...

...Fortunately or unfortunately, this is simply no longer the case— as the 1996 Republican and Democratic conventions both revealed...

...Most journalists, perhaps for obvious reasons, still preferred to act as if the campaign were something separate from themselves—something they simply needed to report rather than something they had to produce...

...There are hopeful signs...

...The fact that most of the money in politics comes from wealth holders and not from wage earners helps to explain why this inequality persists, but it is not the only nor even the most important explanation...

...The goal of an open, freewheeling, genuinely democratic campaign is to make incumbency as insecure and as exposed as possible...

...Money was still important...

...Historically, political parties have depended on their grassroots membership to get out the vote much more than they do now...

...First, none of them will redress the growing crisis of political representation that leaves most poor and working Americans without an adequate voice in the country's governance...

...But the structure of political representation and choice in the United States presents voters with a very limited range of options that leaves them feeling powerless and unrepresented...

...Second, many of them include restrictions on how people can participate in the political system— restrictions that undermine the democracy they are supposedly designed to help save...

...The point is SUMMER • 1997 • 9 Comments and Opinions not to elect particular people to office, but to make sure that the electorate knows whether those elected actually did what they said they'd do and, if not, give it a chance to know why— so that it can hold the candidates accountable...

...The economy accommodates this weakness by elaborating niches where consumers can express their preferences regardless of what everyone else is doing...