The Key to Campaign Reform: Don't Follow the Money
Noah, Timothy
BY TIMOTHY NOAH The Key to Campaign Reform: Don't Follow the Money When you look at the miserable record of campaign reform over the past ten years, the levels of spending that inspired...
...One such proposal is being forwarded in the Senate by Warren Rudman and Daniel Inouye...
...The ad pointed out Frost's support for dairy price supports (despite the fact that there were only three dairy farmers in his Dallas congressional district) and noted that since 1979 Frost has received $27,200 in campaign contributions from the dairy lobby...
...Politicize the A&P Even the worst detractors of the 1974 reforms concede that one component-the disclosure requirement-proved extraordinarily effective...
...TV advertising can account for up to half the total cost of running for office...
...To put it a little more crudely, we want to drive the politicians and the big money contributors as crazy as the politicians have driven the Fred Wertheimers (and Elizabeth Drews...
...But let's look at their combined effect...
...Head-shot commercials would help reduce the cost of political advertising...
...Granted, a government agency might not be allowed to editorialize as effectively as Stern can, but at least locally published lists of campaign contributors would reach the audience they're intended for...
...Timothy Noah is an editor of the Washington Monthly...
...Sure, the information's on file at the FEC...
...Stern's answer is to place advertisements in hometown newspapers, making full use of the disclosure information...
...A 30-second prime-time network spot costs $87,000...
...But when I went to visit Philip M. Stern at the headquarters of Citizens Against PACs, an organization that Stern, a Democrat, co-chairs with Whitney North Seymour, Jr., a Republican, he began our conversation by unraveling an eightfoot financial disclosure form filed by Rep...
...Bovine Broadcasts One of the largest contributors to the high cost of political campaigns is TV commercials...
...by comparison, a full-page ad in the daily New York Times costs $27,000...
...Roy Kogovsik of Colorado...
...The inability of the election law to keep costs down and access to the electoral process open to the impoverished and idealistic has caused the idea of campaign reform to fall into some disrepute...
...To be sure, PACs are routinely denounced, along with the length, expense, and inanity of many political campaigns...
...This might cause the A&P some anxiety, but for the rest of us it could be great fun, and it might eventually cut down on PAC contributions...
...The ideas might even be combined, so that candidates would have to show a running tally of how much they've spent on TV advertising so far...
...When I got there, I could feel the music...
...Customers might come to acquire some say in how that money is ultimately spent by organizing...
...Taken alone, these are impressive figures...
...We shouldn't let the broadcasters off so easily...
...Even if it's not in the candidate's interest to expose his unvarnished self on television, however, it remains in the public interest...
...Alaska...
...PAC contributions, after all, don't come out of thin air...
...The trick is to avoid past pitfalls...
...TV ads tend to be superficial at...
...As for influence-buying, it merely shifted from individuals and corporations to political action committees, which increased their level of spending nearly tenfold between 1974 and 1982...
...Instead, we should insist that they set some of their monopoly profits aside for political advertising...
...Adjusted for inflation, this was a real increase of 18 percent...
...Robert Goodman, a political adman who once put Malcolm Wallop on a horse while a jingle played in the background ("Come join the Wallop Senate Drive/ The Wallop Senate Drive!/ It's alert and it's alive/ And it's Wyoming, to the spurs "), explains the rationale behind such ads quite straightforwardly in The Spot, a new book by Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates: "I try to capture the sense of the state, the sense of the candidacy, and interpret that musically...
...Rather than wrestle with how to control the flow of cash into campaign coffers through public financing and apparently unenforceable spending ceilings, why not address the problem of why politicians need so much money in the first place...
...Three fairly simple changes could make a difference...
...Clearly, any effort to reform television commercials could work up a good motivational head of steam if it focused simply on putting the Robert Goodmans out of business...
...No violins...
...Perhaps the names of the top contributors to a campaign should be required on every piece of campaign literature, like the surgeon general's warning on a pack of cigarettes ("Warning: These People May Not Like Me for My Stand on SALT...
...but as Stern points out, "How do you get the facts out to the voter...
...The FEC could also require a listing of how many ads have appeared so far, along the lines of McDonalds' "Over 15 Billion Served" signs...
...In the public interest, of course...
...Rather, as Elizabeth Drew writes in Politics and Money, we need to put "the same amount of energy and ingenuity into making the law effective that has gone into finding ways around it...
...The bill would prohibit "any visual or auditory material" other than the candidate himself (or an "alternative speaker") speaking directly to the camera...
...Such information could be embarrassing not only for candidates like Frost but also for givers who are playing both sides of the street or who stay out of the game until after the election (like the National Association of Home Builders, which gave Nevada Senator Chris Hecht $10,000 in February, 1983-the maximum allowed for the primary and general election that Hecht had already won-because "we are sensitive to members with debts to retire...
...Here, of course, the object would be to keep corporations rather than candidates honest...
...This brings us to the second reform we should institute: the FCC should direct broadcasters to give a reasonable amount of free time to appearances by political candidates...
...We want to make them suffer...
...The most direct effect would be the elimination of elaborate production expenses, which currently account for 20 to 25 percent of the cost of a political ad...
...One particularly egregious example, from the 1982 campaign of Robin Beard, Republican challenger to Tennessee Senator James Sasser, featured an announcement that Sasser had voted for foreign aid to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, and Cuba and followed it with a close-up of a Fidel Castro look-alike, saying, "Muchissimas gracias, Senor Sasser...
...The broadcasters are playing us-and our electoral system-for suckers...
...One likely reason the post Watergate reforms foundered is that they took their cue from Deep Throat's famous advice to Bob Woodward: "Follow the money...
...The watershed year for outrage over the money that poured into the electoral process (and the growing potential for influence-buying) was 1972...
...But when it comes to the question of actually doing something, many thoughtful people shrug their shoulders...
...My God...
...the employees who contribute earn their salaries through the sale of certain products or services...
...This is too cynical...
...A final frontier for disclosure lies in the political ads of the candidates themselves...
...Martin Frost help the dairy lobby milk his constituents...
...No "Muchissimas gracias, Senor Sasser" With the "talking heads" commercials we would see the unvarnished candidate, the person he really is-and if he really was determined to try to mislead us, he would have to do so on his own, without special effects...
...The spirit of these reforms, and others like them that we should be trying to think of, should not be the calm, deliberative spirit that has given us the present system-a rational calculation of the public interest that misses its target by miles...
...The rest of the time the FCC requires even less: what they're charging "comparable users...
...Between 1968 and 1972, the amount spent on general elections rose from $300 million to $425 million...
...The result: between 1976 and 1980, the price rose from $540 million to $1.2 billion-a real increase of 54 percent...
...BY TIMOTHY NOAH The Key to Campaign Reform: Don't Follow the Money When you look at the miserable record of campaign reform over the past ten years, the levels of spending that inspired the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act seem quaint...
...At the very least, FCC disclosure in local newspapers would provide us with information we need to assess candidates...
...Howard Hughes contributed $100,000 to Richard Nixon's reelection campaign, Robert Vesco gave $200,000, and the dairy industry and W. Clement Stone each kicked in $2 million...
...Another ad from the same year showed several cows discussing NCPAC's attack on Senator John Melcher of Montana...
...For example, Stern ran an ad in the Dallas Morning News that asked, "Why did Rep...
...The public grants them licenses that virtually guarantee to make them rich through monopoly ownership and then allows them to raise the cost of running for office by charging commercial prices for political advertisements...
...if we keep spending at this rate, every politician will have to be either a millionaire or a full-time fundraiser...
...Given that it is the politicians who will have to provide these reforms, such legislative masochism won't be easy to achieve, but nothing is impossible in a democracy...
...Another way might be to require at the end of each political TV ad that the names of the top contributors appear along with the name of the owner of the station and the price he's charging for the TV time...
...This is a polite way of saying that the average politician would end up putting viewers to sleep, and his advisors would soon be telling him that the money spent on TV was not merely wasted, but downright counterproductive...
...at most, it would shame candidates and contributors out of soliciting (or contributing) excessively...
...Supermarkets could become little laboratories of democracy (or guerrilla theater) where competitive boycotts raged between conservatives and liberals...
...Objections to the role money plays in the The Key to Campaig Don't Fol political process are worth trying to translate into reforms that will work...
...Then came Watergate and the 1974 reforms-the introduction of public financing, contribution limits, and spending ceilings aimed at keeping campaign costs under control...
...Rather than relying on the efforts of groups like Stern's (or of opposing candidates) to get this information into the newspapers, why doesn't the FEC simply take out the ads itself...
...And as Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate and the author of the talking heads proposal, told a Senate hearing, it also "would reduce costs by reducing the use of television commercials as a whole, since talking head commercials are likely to be seen as less useful than the present more demagogic variety of commercials...
...No cows...
...Money is an issue...
...Herbert Alexander, a University of Southern California professor who for several years has been the leading authority on the subject, goes further: "I think the high cost of politics is a phony issue in most respects...
...Writing in The New Republic, Robert Samuelson rejected the idea "that there are possible reforms that would represent substantial improvements without aggravating current deficiencies or creating new ones...
...best and foolish at worst...
...According to current law, broadcasters are required only to charge candidates the "lowest unit charge" during the 45 days before a primary or 60 days before an election...
...If we started feeling really mischievous, we could also require corporations whose PACs have contributed to federal elections to disclose these expenditures on the labels of their products...
Vol. 16 • July 1984 • No. 6
