The Hard Fight Against Soft Money
If you haven’t heard the news, money is still winning. Though each day more dirt tumbles forth about the disgraceful role of special-interest money in the 1996 elections, Congress has turned its back on campaign-finance reform. Many people will despair that anything can change, but it’s important to remember this bit of history: All of the great American reform movements – from civil rights to child-labor laws – started far from Washington, D.C. In state legislatures and town halls, activists first pushed their bold experiments locally. Their energy and momentum eventually led to legislative action at the national level.
And it’s happening again. An impressive grass-roots victory occurred last fall in Maine when voters approved, by a 56 to 44 percent margin, a statewide referendum establishing a “clean elections” option for their state government. Candidates for governor or the legislature will now have a choice: Either rely on the usual private sources for money or accept only public financing and a spending ceiling for their campaigns. Since special-interest money might bury a “clean money” candidate, the Maine plan offers matching grants to help challengers keep up.
The same idea, with many variations, is now stimulating debate and optimism in at least 14 states, from Connecticut to Vermont to North Carolina to Oregon. “We have to surround them,” says Ellen Miller, the executive director of Public Campaign, a new organization that’s coordinating the charge. “As long as an inside strategy is played, we will get what we’ve always gotten.”
“The level of distaste for Washington fund raising is very high right now,” says Miles Rapoport, Connecticut’s reform-minded secretary of state. “And that substantially enhances the public’s desire for reform. What we need to do is get candidates off the treadmill of raising large-scale money from special interests – or at least make it possible for those who want to choose the alternative.”
The Connecticut clean-money measure failed narrowly on its first assembly vote last month, but it will be back. “This issue will be with us for years,” Rapoport promises, “because the surge of corporate money isn’t going to get any better. Absent reform, it’s going to get worse.”
In North Carolina, the reform coalition does not have to turn to Washington for campaign scandals, since there are plenty right at home. The Institute for Southern Studies, in Durham, has discovered, for instance, that a mere 350 families and business associates give one-third of all the campaign money raised by North Carolina’s politicians from both parties. Who are these public-spirited families? Industrialists, real-estate developers, agribusiness owners, oil millionaires, financial brokers, utilities executives and, of course, the lawyers who represent those interests.
“They really believe in democracy – right,” snorts Pete MacDowell, coordinator for the North Carolina Alliance for Democracy. “They’re investing in the political system, and they get an enormous return on their investment. The North Carolina banking industry, for example, puts $1 million [each year] into lobbying and contributions, and it gets $54 million in a tax loophole.” MacDowell knows that the legislative struggle will be long and arduous, but he is excited by the reform energies mobilizing across the South, where business interests have always dominated politics.
Washington yawns. The insiders (including, probably, Bill Clinton) assume that except for reform agitators, nobody really cares about the corrupting influence of campaign money. People figure that everyone takes it, so what’s the point of fighting it? Republicans deride the public-financing remedy as “welfare for politicians,” and many voters no doubt agree.
I have a hunch that the insiders are wrong this time, that public revulsion will deepen as we hear more about the fund-raising scandals swamping Bill Clinton and the Republicans. The real barrier to reform, I suspect, is the public’s sense of utter resignation about politics accomplishing anything worthwhile for it.
If the clean-money campaign were to choose a national poster boy, he might be the retired Marine general who is now Florida’s state comptroller. Bob Milligan overcame great odds in 1994 to defeat a long-entrenched Democratic incumbent whose campaigns were bankrolled by the very financial industry he was supposed to regulate. Floridians were fed up with banking scandals; Milligan promised to clean up the office. His candidacy seemed quixotic – until public financing arrived for a dramatic rescue.
“The special-interest groups are driving the train,” Milligan says. “That’s why public financing is so good. It helps people like myself who are interested in participating in public service but don’t have any support base and, as a result, can’t raise the funds.”
At 64, Milligan seems to be a model of the citizen politician who wants to serve without making a career out of it. He retired from the Marine Corps, in 1991, as a three-star general and became active in Republican politics in his hometown of Panama City. In Florida, the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s included outrageous cases of looting by highflying bankers. Milligan figured that he could improve things by depoliticizing the comptroller’s office.
“I found out pretty quick that I wasn’t going to get any support from the financial industry,” he says. “My opponent was very cozy with the industry he regulated, and one of my pledges was to try to separate myself from that. You’d have thought I was going to assassinate the pope.”
Florida’s system of partial public financing was enacted back in 1986 but, because of various legal challenges, didn’t get activated until the 1994 election. The state provides matching funds to candidates, who must first raise a substantial threshold amount on their own from small contributors who give $250 or less. Candidates who opt out and rely solely on private contributions can exceed the spending limits, but their opponents will receive a dollar-for-dollar match from the state, up to a point. “It creates a disincentive for a nonparticipating candidate to exceed the limit,” says Sally Spener, executive director of Florida Common Cause. “For every dollar you raise over the limit, you’re giving a dollar to your opponent.”
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