Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [131]
Every time public campaign financing has been on the ballot for the people to vote on, it has won. Both Massachusetts and Arizona, two states of no noticeable political similarity, voted for it in 1998. The more states that try this, the more experience we have with it and the better we can make it work.
Here’s the way Arizona does it. If you want to run for the state legislature in Arizona, you have to raise X amount (a substantial sum) in $5 increments (one per person) from people who actually live in the district you want to represent. No lobby money, no special-interest money, just your friends and neighbors kicking in five bucks each because they know you from your work on the school board, or the park board, or the planning board—know you well enough to think you’d make a decent representative for them. Once you raise that sum in $5 amounts, you qualify for state money, taxpayer money, money kicked in by the state’s voters who want to see honest elections. You agree to limit your campaign to the amount available to you from the public pool. If you’re rich, you might decide not to take the state money and to self-finance your campaign instead, but naturally your opponent will call you a malefactor of great wealth and other nasty names if you do so. “My plutocratic opponent Joe Doaks, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is using his own money like a Rockefeller to buy this election!”
In a touch we especially liked—although the courts later held it unconstitutional—Arizona initially voted to raise some of this public campaign financing by putting a special tax on lobbyists. Such a brilliant notion. We hate that it didn’t fly.
Always the question with public campaign financing is where to set the bar—how much money do you have to raise on your own before you qualify for public funds? If you set the bar too high, only the designated candidates of the major political parties will ever qualify. On the other hand, if you set it too low, every nincompoop in town will be able to run for public office on the taxpayer’s nickel. The more experience we have, the better we get at setting the bar.
John McCain and Russ Feingold got the first, tiny, baby step toward campaign-finance reform at the federal level through Congress in the teeth of a screaming hissy fit against it thrown by the entire establishment. That took an amazing amount of people power. People power can still beat money power, when the people get stirred up enough. McCain-Feingold may not achieve much—especially since George W. appointed a radical anti-reformer to the board that is supposed to implement the bill’s reforms—but it is a beginning.
All of us are responsible for our magnificent political heritage winding up in a system of legalized bribery. Political consultants all say campaign-finance reform is a nonstarter of an issue. It certainly is if you go around calling it campaign finance instead of rank, open bribery, which is what it is. Polls show people are perfectly well aware of the stacked deck in politics, it’s just that no one puts it at the top of his list. People tend to be more concerned about health care, education, privacy, whatever. We need to make the point over and over that we can’t get anywhere on any other issue until we fix legalized bribery. The oldest saying in politics is: “You got to dance with them what brung you.” We need to fix the system so that when politicians get elected, they’ve got no one to dance with—no one they owe—except us, the people. When we pay for the campaigns, the politicians work for us. When big money pays, the politicians work for them.
For starters, corporations should be prohibited from contributing funds or in-kind support to political candidates, officials, political action committees, political parties, lobbyists, ballot