IT IS TIME for conservative leaders and activists to reexamine their opposition to federal campaign finance reform.
They should do so because there is a strong conservative case for reform. They should do so because, if conservative leaders continue to just say no, there is a real danger that campaign finance reform, which is popular with the public, will be enacted in a form that makes the campaign funding system even worse than it is today.
There is another reason for conservatives to get behind reform. The transformation of the system since the Reagan era, and especially the rise to dominance of “soft money” during the Clinton era, is changing the world of federal campaign funding into one that favors, on balance, Democrats.
This became evident in recent weeks with the publication of the half-year financial reports of the Democratic and Republican campaign committees that fund races for the House and Senate. For the first time in living memory, the Democrats are in better shape than the Republicans. As of June 30, the House Democratic committee had $ 15 million more cash on hand than did its GOP counterpart, while the Democrats’ edge on the Senate side was around $ 6 million.
These Democratic advantages are especially striking in view of the fact that Republicans control both the House and Senate, normally a huge fund-raising asset. Added to the decades-long GOP financial edge that held firm even when Republicans were in the minority, this should be giving the Republicans massive financial superiority. Yet those endlessly chronicled shakedowns of big business supposedly conducted by GOP House whip Tom (“The Hammer”) DeLay seem to be less effective than those presided over by Democratic Senate campaign chairman Robert Torricelli and House chairman Patrick Kennedy.
Part of the emerging Democratic tilt is that labor unions have significantly stepped up their soft-money giving. The $ 15 million they have given so far in the 2000 election cycle is 50 percent more than the entire amount they gave in the 1996 and 1998 cycles. And virtually all labor money goes to the Democrats.
Corporations are giving more than ever as well, but their giving is now almost evenly divided between the two parties. Democrats have become increasingly adept at raising soft money from business interests.
Torricelli is becoming particularly renowned for harvesting six-figure checks from both sides of issues before Congress. But his adeptness may be obscuring a critical point: Soft-money fund-raising, focused on economic interests and unconstrained by any legal limit on contributions, may be peculiarly suited to the party that is the more disposed ideologically to intervene in the private sector. In our politics, that is the Democratic party. Which is why the Democrats have become so willing and able to shake down business interests, with the threat, or promise, of government policies that would help or harm their particular industries.
There may be a post-Cold War aspect to all this. In the century when the primary political debate was capitalism vs. socialism, most democracies featured a battle between a party or coalition that was pro-capitalist and a party that was, at minimum, skeptical of capitalism, and in some cases hostile to private enterprise. In those cases, business tended to side with the more or less pro-market party.
But in the post-Cold War era, ideological lines have blurred, especially on economic issues. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton sound pro-business in most contexts. When business, particularly big business, no longer feels its existence is on the line, it is much more likely to look to its narrow interests, and to whatever group of politicians can best serve them at any given time. And Democrats are willing to use government to serve those interests — and to use the threat of government to raise money from them.
Whatever fund-raising success Democrats may be enjoying in the struggle for Congress, we can hear conservatives saying, surely little of this applies to presidential politics. After all, George W. Bush, with his ocean of $ 1,000 checks and refusal to accept matching federal funds in the GOP primaries, outclasses any candidate in the realm of fund-raising — in this presidential cycle or any other.
He does. But that’s because in presidential primary financing, the $ 1,000 check and direct mail are still dominant, and Bush did well in both. Soft money begins to matter only after the party nominee is known. In the 2000 election cycle, that phase began for both parties in early March.
Between March and June, both parties raised soft money and spent little. In that three-month period, Bush went from a roughly even race to a high-single-digit lead over Gore in most national polls. In early June, the Democratic National Committee went up with a multi-million-dollar, soft-money-financed TV campaign of “issue ads” singing the praises of Al Gore on a series of issues, including prescription drug coverage for seniors and a patients’ bill of rights. The Republican National Committee decided not to counter or to run significant pro-Bush ads of its own. Gore has now narrowed the gap with Bush.
The DNC ads and the poll shift may be unrelated. Some Republican strategists argue that, in 1995-96, the “issue ads” written in the Oval Office by Bill Clinton and Dick Morris and put on the air with massive amounts of soft money by the Democratic National Committee had nothing to do with Clinton’s opening up a solid lead over Bob Dole. (If they had thought differently, Republicans presumably would have made more than token efforts to finance soft-money issue ads of their own, instead of leaving the Clinton ads pretty much uncontested.) But when history shows signs of repeating itself, with one party massively on the air at a formative stage of the campaign and the other dark, one can hardly be blamed for wondering whether the balance of political forces is starting to change. And one can hardly be blamed for wondering why Republicans retain an affection for a soft-money system that harms their electoral prospects and gives politicians leverage over the private sector in a way fundamentally hostile to any hopes for restoring what conservatives claim to believe in — limited government.
Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel, along with Michigan’s Spencer Abraham and a handful of other congressional conservatives, are working toward legislation to ban or severely limit soft money. Unlike more liberal versions of campaign finance reform, including McCain-Feingold, Hagel’s bill would try to reinvigorate private giving with a long overdue raising of the contribution limit, frozen at $ 1,000 for a generation. Hagel deserves help from conservative leaders and activists. If he doesn’t get it, the Robert Torricellis could wind up the winners from conservatives’ reluctance to engage the issue of campaign finance reform.
