The Long March of
Campaign Finance Reform

excerpted from the book

How to Overthrow the Government

by Arianna Huffington

ReganBooks, 2000, paper

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"The moral test of government," said Hubert Humphrey, who helped establish Medicare thirty-four years ago, "is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the unemployed."

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THE LONG MARCH OF CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

The strongest signal that we need campaign finance reform is the fact that our leaders refuse to enact any. This is despite the public's overwhelming support for the issue. If the will of the people doesn't matter to them, what does-the will of the big-bucks contributors?

Now, for some, the topic of campaign finance reform- the nuts and bolts of how we fund elections-may seem like inside politics. But that's just the problem: Corruption has crawled inside our political system, like a virus that burrows into a healthy body and cripples its host. "This democracy cannot survive without the confidence of the people in the legislative and electoral process," Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI.) told his colleagues. "The prevalence-no, the dominance-of money in our system of elections and our legislature will in the end cause them to crumble. If we don't take steps to clean up this system it ultimately will consume us along with our finest American ideals."

Doris Haddock-"Granny D," the eighty-nine-year-old great-grandmother who walked from the Pacific to the Atlantic to call attention to the way big money corrupts politics-agrees. "It is my belief," she told the 1999 Reform Party Convention, "that a worthy American ought to be able to run for a public office without having to sell his or her soul to the corporations or the unions.... Fund-raising muscle should not be the measure of a candidate. Ideas, character, track record, leadership skills-those ought to be the measures of our leaders."

Granny D has a clear vision of democracy, and that is what motivates her drive to sweep big money out of politics. "It is said that democracy is not something we have, but something we do," she told the convention delegates. "But right now, we cannot do it because we cannot speak. We are shouted down by the bullhorns of big money. It is money with no manners for democracy, and it must be escorted from the room. If money is speech, then those with more money have more speech, and that idea is antithetical to democracy."

She modeled her cross-country trek on that of Mildred Norman, known as the "Peace Pilgrim," who walked across the country seven times between 1948 and 1958 to promote world peace. Each day, the Peace Pilgrim walked until she was offered a place to rest, and fasted until she was handed food. So did Granny D. She trained for her pilgrimage by hiking ten miles a day with a twenty-five pound knapsack. Her cell phone kept her in regular contact with radio stations around the country.

Haddock was born in Dublin, New Hampshire, the village where she still serves on the town council and is a deacon of the Episcopal Church. Campaign finance reform was a frequent topic of discussion in the Tuesday Morning Academy, which Granny D describes as "a group of old women like me." The issue kept gnawing at her until January 1998, when she saw an old man walking along the highway, "miles and miles from any town or house.

"This old man mesmerized me," she wrote in her diary. "His image resonated with something deep in me. I had been worrying for months about how . . . I might use my time-what I have left of it. As we drove further there seemed to be some connection with this man on the road and that simmering question. l had been on the road myself a long time ago with my husband Jim, and for a high political purpose. This old man was perhaps some ghost of those days, still out there like a part of me. He was calling to me, as might my late husband be calling.

"Something else had been eating at me, too. In the 1960s my husband and I . . . had indeed helped to achieve an impressive political victory to prevent nuclear detonations near an Alaskan village. Part of our success was made possible because we were able to appeal to the sense of fair play of U.S. Senators and Representatives. When they knew what we knew, they gladly and forcefully helped us stop a bad program.

"But things have changed. During my husband's final years I worked hard, and successfully, to bring additional modest services to our town for people with Alzheimer's Disease and dementia. These people needed services, and their family caregivers needed support. The logic and necessity of these programs was obvious, yet our only way of getting funding was to raise money privately, which we did . . . it was no longer possible to just call our Congressperson and get some help. Congresspersons, I discovered, were no longer interested in what someone might have to suggest if they were not big-money contributors, regardless of the merits of their idea or the necessity of a program. I could never fully accept this new fact.

"For the first time in my life I felt politically powerless- which is something no American should ever feel. It was like not living in one's own country. There were solutions to the campaign finance mess, but the best ideas kept getting voted down in Congress. My own senator would not respond to my requests for action-ignoring a stack of petitions I had gathered on the subject. It all sickened me-an old Yankee who was used to calling up my Rep and getting things moving. To not have a Senator or Congressman! My God; one might as well be in China. It was deeply disturbing. A few minutes after seeing the old man on the highway, it occurred to me that I should go on the road, too. I should do it for campaign finance reform."

When Bill Clinton and Al Gore arrived in Little Rock to launch Gore's presidential bid, Haddock held a silent vigil in front of the Statehouse Convention Center to protest Gore's refusal to reject soft money.

"The future," political theorist John Schaar wrote, "is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created-created first in mind and will, created next in activity." That's a fair summation of Granny D's words and deeds.

Meanwhile, back in Congress, Senator Mitch McConnell and his friends are thumbing their noses at the future. Like drunks on a bender, they know we're on the road to political ruin, but don't have the will to admit they need help. ( Hi, my name is Trent, and I'm a fund-raise-aholic.")

If they ever decide to get clean they won't have to look far for a sponsor. Sen. John McCain knows well the perils of demon money, its powers of addiction. To increase the chances of his bill passing the Senate, McCain and his cosponsor Sen. Russ Feingold even stripped of it a key controversial provision, the ban on issue ads sixty days before an election. What they kept intact is the crown jewel of McCain-Feingold: a complete ban on soft money, the unregulated, unlimited contributions to political parties that have become the lifeblood of our corrupt politics.

The strategy deprived opponents of their favorite 'highfalutin'' argument: that reform is an assault on the First Amendment (with which many of them recently began a passionate and suspicious affair). Soft money corporate contributions-often equally dispersed to both parties- can be looked at as a business investment, or as legalized bribery. But they are certainly not expressions of free speech. Indeed, the ban on corporate campaign contributions was shepherded into law by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907. That ban is still in place; the concept of soft money, far from endangering free speech, is a giant loophole that has effectively abrogated the law.

Granny D was in Washington to lend support as the bill was debated. "I walked with McCain and Feingold from their offices to the Capitol," she told me. (After 2,200 miles, what's a few more blocks for reform?) "I wanted them to know that the people out in the hinterlands are worried, frustrated and feel that their most basic freedom-to be a self-governing people-has been taken from them by big-money politics."

Yet campaign finance foes and presidential candidates continue to propagate the nonsense that contributors are just average Americans participating in the political process. It's the "just folks" spin, used to explain away the millions of dollars raised by Bush, Gore, and Bradley.

The ruse is particularly laughable as a defense of soft money. Nevertheless, it is used again and again, as are any number of unsustainable arguments. There was McConnell during the debate last fall, lashing out at McCain, soft money plumage in full glory, grandiloquently asking, "How can it be corruption if no one is corrupt?" He was clearly counting on McCain's reluctance to name names on the Senate floor. Then two supposed supporters of reform tried to kill it. Sen. Bob Torricelli (D-NJ. - who, as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was credited with a 130 percent increase in soft money contributed to its coffers-joined Minority Leader Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) in offering a substitute to the bill that would also regulate "issues advertising." In the name of more perfect reform, the amendment would have ensured that no reform at all got passed by reintroducing a ban on specific-issue ads that is a poison pill to conservatives. It's not surprising that Torricelli's move came immediately after conservative Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback signed on with McCain. It's a congressional favorite: Don't like a bill? Stick an unpopular amendment to it and watch them both go down.

When the Democratic National Committee announced last summer that it planned to raise $200 million of soft money in time for the presidential race, former Carter pollster Pat Caddell concluded that "to get that kind of money there will have to be a fire sale of the government. This time they won't be renting the Lincoln bedroom, they'll be selling whole wings and entire Cabinet departments." Republicans are just as deeply engaged in the public policy sell-off, having already raised $31 million in soft money, nearly double the amount raised in the same period four years ago. Even more important, they will also have the potential to raise hundreds of millions in soft money through Bush's Pioneers.

What we're watching here is the market system-supply and demand-applied in the one place it doesn't belong: the pursuit of the common good. Just look at Bush. The corporate world senses that he'll be coming into a pretty good supply of public policy in a short while, and the advance orders are flooding in. Which is key in such a tight market. Show up on Election Day to buy yourself some of the public good and you'll find it's already sold out. Buy early, buy often, and then you can sit back and wait for the loopholes and tax and regulatory exemptions to be delivered ... at least until the midterm campaigns begin, when they 11 be glad to start filling orders again.

It's not just reformers and those shut out of the system who are disgusted by what's happening. Even corporate leaders, who are at the heart of the soft money quid pro quo, are beginning to balk at the shakedowns. "The pressure to give soft money can be quite intense," said Edward Kangas of the Committee for Economic Development, a group of business executives that came out last year in favor of banning soft money and curbing issue ads. "And the more a business is impacted by federal regulation, the more it feels it doesn't have a choice." But "extortion" is such an ugly word; "soft money" is so much easier on the ears.

As Charles Kolb, president of the committee and a former Bush administration official, added: "We're tired of being hit up and shaken down.... The subtext is, 'If you won't play with me, I won't play with you." 'The subtext became the text when McConnell, the human roadblock standing in the way of campaign finance reform, sent blistering letters to members of the CED urging them to resign because of the committee's "all-out campaign to eviscerate private sector participation in politics." I guess he forgot that other way the private sector can participate in politics-voting.

McConnell also claimed that the reforms would "render the Republican Party powerless to defend pro-business candidates from negative TV attacks by labor unions, trial lawyers and radical environmentalists." How inspiring- finally, someone has stepped forward to defend that poor waif the "pro-business candidate."

Last September, McConnell compared his enemies' return year after year to "Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction." He has gone so far as to cloak himself in the moral cloth of the civil rights movement. "On this issue of whether the money is important to speech and campaigns," he said, summarizing a truly impressive amount of gall, "Thurgood Marshall and I are on the same side." Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.), who has co-sponsored companion legislation to McCain-Feingold in the House, sees a different parallel. "This is like the civil rights struggle," he told me. "We have to keep bringing the bill up again and again and again, forcing its opponents to expose themselves by filibustering it."

In fact, this battle has even more in common with the civil rights struggle. Years and years from now, long after this legislation has passed and people are shocked that anyone would ever have considered soft money bribes legal, history will render its stern judgment on those who blocked this reform. Yes, Sen. McConnell, civil rights may be the appropriate metaphor here, but it's not one that bodes well for your legacy. Just ask George Wallace.

So the big-bucks binge continues to intoxicate the Senate. But the time has come for an intervention-even if it means dragging the Republican leadership kicking and screaming off to donor detox. After all, the Progressive Era, the last great era of electoral reform (excluding the outburst after Watergate), was led by a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt. "This sums up my whole attitude in the matter," he said on the role of money in politics. "[It] is, after all, simply the question of treating each man, rich or poor, on his merits, and making him feel that at the White House, which is the nation's property, all reputable citizens of the nation are sure of like treatment."

So anyone who's convinced there's no way to change the system, take note: It's been done before. Primary elections, direct elections (until the Progressive Era, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures), the initiative and referendum process-all these came as the result of the turn-of-the-century Progressives' movement for clean and open government. But by far the most profound and lasting influence of the Progressive reforms stemmed from their concern about the unchecked power of monopolies over the economic and political life of the nation-indeed, over the very lives of average Americans. The Progressives' reluctant answer was to furnish the federal government- which presumably through the other electoral reforms would be made more responsive to the public-with the power to meet the plutocrats on an equal footing.

In March 1908, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette gave one of the most famous speeches ever delivered in the United States Senate. "He attempted to prove," Richard Hofstadter writes in The Age of Reform, "with careful documentation from the interlocking directorates of American corporations that fewer than one hundred men, acting in concert, controlled the great business interests of the country. 'Does anyone doubt,' he asked, 'the community of interest that binds these men together?"'

Political liberty is always linked to economic liberty; that was at the heart of Woodrow Wilson's 1912 campaign for president, in which he embarked on "a crusade against powers that have governed us, that have limited our development, that have determined our lives, that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please." The Jeffersonian ideal was being wiped out by corporations consuming the entire economy. Wilson's great fear was that "the voice of the ordinary voter would be as effectively eliminated from political influence as the voice of the ordinary stockholder had been from the conduct of the giant corporation." The power of economic decision had been stolen from the people, and Progressives feared that the power of political decision would follow, if not by directly controlled state legislatures, then by bought-and-paid-for machine politicians. So they fought to ensure that a freely and democratically elected government-with vast new powers to regulate-could stand firm against the power of the plutocrats. It's a battle that has to be fought again today.

The 1976 Supreme Court decision-Buckley v. Valeo that equated campaign contributions with free speech, has become the ace in the hole of opponents of electoral reform. But as A. J. Liebling famously put it, there is only "freedom of the press for those who can afford to own one." The same holds true in modern political life: The democratic process is open only to those who can afford to own a politician.

Among the forces trying to change this is Public Campaign, founded by Ellen Miller to bring about a campaign finance strategy known as "Clean Money." "How do you get to the average citizen?" asks Miller. "Through state-based organizations and initiatives. We use the states to organize people around the idea. So the political viability of Clean Money arises in the states, and then after building grassroots support, we hope to proceed to federal reforms.

The Clean Money agenda seeks to address the four fundamentals" of campaign finance reform: the rising costs of campaigns, the conflict of interest inherent in private donations, the lack of competition for incumbent candidates, and the never-ending money chase.

In order to qualify for Clean Money funding, candidates must pass an eligibility threshold by gathering signatures and raising a prescribed number of contributions, following a strict set of guidelines. Once a candidate has requested Clean Money funding, he agrees to accept no more private contributions during the election cycle. Federal candidates get free and discounted TV and radio airtime. And if a nonparticipating candidate outspends a Clean Money candidate, or issues ads" are run against him, the participating candidate is given a limited amount of matching funds.

So far, clean elections laws have been passed via the initiative process in Arizona, Massachusetts, and Maine. On November 5, U.S. District Judge D. Brock Hornby ruled that Maine's law was constitutional, its public financing system not a violation of free speech. In Vermont in June 1997, Gov. Howard Dean signed a comprehensive campaign finance law. "Vermont's law does what everyone wants," Miller says. "[It] caps the cost of campaigns for statewide office, cuts out special interest funders, eliminates raising big money as the test of a candidate's viability, and stops the money chase."

The law also includes a direct challenge to Buckley v. Valeo. Mandatory limits are imposed on candidates who don't accept the Clean Money public financing, and choose instead to raise private money. This portion of the measure is "severable," and is designed to force a court challenge to Buckley. If it loses in court, the rest of the measure stays intact.

Passed by the legislature (quite a surprise to all those who thought the only way to get reform is via a ballot measure), the law goes into effect in 2000. It calls for the basic Clean Money trade-off: To get public funding, candidates must eschew private donations and agree to spending caps. Candidates for governor must raise $35,000 in contributions of no more than $50 from at least 1,500 registered voters between February and July of the election year; lieutenant governor candidates have to raise half that amount from half the number of registered voters. Candidates for governor get $40,000 for the primary; those who make it to the general receive another $250,000. The public money will come from annual "report fees" paid by domestic and foreign business corporations, a tax on lobbyists' expenditures, and a "Vermont campaign fund add-on"-a pool of voluntary contributions from citizens through a check-off on tax returns.

The way Vermont eliminates soft money is by defining it out of existence, calling it a "direct" contribution and thereby making it subject to stringent limits. "Issues" expenditures made with a candidate's approval or cooperation are also limited, and full disclosure is part of the package.

The stage was set for reform in Vermont after the governor admitted what we know to be true for all candidates: that those who contributed to his campaign had "bought access." Vermonters were especially concerned that money from outside the state, which is relatively poor, was pouring in to buy elections.

As a consequence, a reform coalition was born. Republican state senate leaders, environmentalists, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, the League of Women Voters, and the American Association of University Women met every week in the State House cafeteria to develop ways-including phone banks and a letter-writing campaign-to sway uncommitted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. In the end, their bill was passed 121 to 17 in the Vermont House, and 20 to 9 in the Senate. Miller calls the "Vermont Campaign Option" "the camel's nose under the tent": It won't single-handedly reform American politics, but it's hard to ignore and shows reform can be accomplished.

In California, the Oaks Project-described by chief organizer Bill Gallagher as "a Marine Corps for citizens who want to be the best"-is collecting signatures for a Taxpayer Protection Amendment which would ban public officials from accepting contributions for five years from any private interest they took action to benefit through legislation.

At the federal level, beyond the Shays-Meehan bill in the House and McCain-Feingold in the Senate, other proposed reforms include a pair of so-called "Clean Money, Clean Elections" bills introduced in the Senate by Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) and in the House by Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.). These bills offer financing from a federal clean-elections fund to candidates who voluntarily forgo private contributions and agree to strict spending limits. They also ban soft money, rein in issues ads, and provide free TV and radio. While no one thinks Wellstone-Kerry has a chance of passing, it is a "marker bill" or a "vision bill"-a look at what could be possible someday and a direction to move in.

Opponents of campaign finance reform who dare not defend the current system argue that "full disclosure" would do the trick. One bill, offered by Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.), would completely deregulate the campaign financing system-allowing unlimited contributions to candidates and parties in exchange for full, prompt disclosure through the Federal Elections Commission. Euphemistically called the "Citizen Legislature and Political Freedom Act," it is rightly nicknamed the "Do Little Bill." The bill's defenders, such as Roger Pilon, director of the CATO Institute's Center for Constitutional Studies, argue unconvincingly that "money buys access, it does not buy votes. It is through access that information is imparted and interests made known, which is precisely what political speech is about." But when the only people with access are the ones with money, you know what happens: "Money talks, everyone else walks."

Which brings us back to Granny D, who argues that "businesses are not people," and that to extend First Amendment protections to corporations is to misunderstand and undermine the true meaning of freedom of speech. She's right-but the Supreme Court disagrees, and as a result our political life is drowning in corporate money. Clean Money legislation is specifically calibrated to avoid the First Amendment objection to reform by making most of its provisions voluntary.

An intriguing alternative for reforming campaigns has been put forward by Ian Ayres, a law professor at Yale, and Jeremy Bulow, an economics professor at Stanford. It's the "donor booth," which seeks to correct the rampant buying and selling of influence in the political process by arguing not for complete and instant donor disclosure, as championed by Doolittle and McConnell, but for complete and total donor anonymity.

It is a simple idea-and a radical one. But, as Professor Ayres reminded me, the radical idea on which it's modeled-the secret ballot-is only about a century old, though we take it for granted today. The secret ballot was invented in the late nineteenth century, an era when party bosses would herd voters to the polls where ballots for opposing candidates were printed on different color paper. Voters were expected to wave the ballots over their heads so the bosses could be sure they were getting what they paid for. The secret ballot put a halt to vote buying, and professors Ayres and Bulow found in that development the inspiration for their proposal.

"The voting booth," Ayres says, "made it harder for candidates to buy votes. The 'donor booth' would make it harder for candidates to sell influence." If a candidate can't be sure who votes for him, he is not likely to engage in outright vote-buying. Likewise, contributors who (in the immortal words of Roger Tamraz) consider the buying of influence the "only reason" for giving would lose their main incentive.

Would it really work? In some states, it already has. Louisiana, Tennessee, Washington, and North Dakota have experimented with keeping donors to judicial campaigns anonymous; after all, you wouldn't want to stand before a judge who had just pocketed a few hundred thousand from your opponent. Yet something similar happens in Congress every day.

The reason for the donor booth is the same as the one for the voting booth: to reduce the potential for corruption. In the political arena, the danger is not merely quid pro quo corruption, but the possibility of politicians no longer being open to honest deliberations because they have, in a sense, already sold their position. It is this threat to deliberative democracy the professors are hoping to check with anonymity.

In the last election cycle, less than one-quarter of one percent of Americans contributed $200 or more to a federal candidate. Yet this tiny group generated 80 percent of all donations. McConnell likes to say that in 1996, campaigns overall "spent per eligible voter $3.89, about the price of a McDonald's value meal." It'd be closer to the truth to say that a few thousand people bought up several million value meals-while the rest of America went hungry.

"Under the current system," wrote Ayres and Bulow in their 1998 article for the Stanford Law Review, "small donors have virtually no impact on the electoral process.... Mandated anonymity, by reducing the importance of large donations, makes small donors relatively more important and thus might induce less affluent donors to give more."

The system would work by having campaign contributions funneled through blind trusts administered by known, reputable financial firms. Anyone who wanted to give money to a particular candidate would mail it to the trust, which would then pass it on to the candidate-without revealing the donor's name. Like any reform, this would create its own set of problems. What's to stop a donor, for instance, from telling the candidate that he just made an "anonymous" donation? Nothing, obviously. But talk is cheap. And what's to stop someone who hasn't made a donation from bragging that he did?

But at this stage, even cynics are ready to exchange a new set of problems for the old ones. The breathing space made possible by the donor booth would-at least until clever lawyers nosed out all the loopholes-provide precious oxygen for our political system.

Sunlight may be the best of disinfectants, and electric light the most efficient policeman, but when it comes to the money-access-policy nexus, no disclosure is better than full disclosure, and less information is better than more. "Imagine what a world with anonymous donations would look like," Ayres and Bulow write. "No more selling nights in the Lincoln bedroom. No more ambassadorships . . . or trade missions for successful fund-raisers. Put simply, it will be more difficult for candidates to sell access or influence if they are unsure whether a donor has paid the price."

With the donor booth, PAC money would dry up- because knowing who's giving is exactly why PACs exist. Donor anonymity would prove-as if more proof were needed-just how many contributions have nothing to do with the donor's political ideas and everything to do with the donor's policy desires-which politicians can satisfy by selling off billions of dollars in contracts, tax write-offs, corporate welfare, government posts, and subsidies. And while the protectors of the status quo keep trying to use constitutional arguments to protect soft money, this proposal is as constitutionally unassailable as the secret ballot.

"Just as there is no constitutional right," the professors wrote, "to be able to prove that you voted for Clinton, there is no constitutional right to be able to prove that you gave Clinton money. The voting booth also burdens political expression: No matter how much a conservative wants, she can never prove that she did not vote for McGovern (or a liberal can't prove he didn't vote for Reagan). Since voting is the quintessential act of political expression, surely denying citizens the right to prove for whom they voted is more burdensome than denying citizens the right to prove they gave a candidate more than $200."

Donor anonymity calls everyone's bluff, and public funding of campaigns cuts the Gordian knot of contributions and public policy. For the moment, there are at least individual citizens who are taking a stand. There are CEOs pledging not to give soft money to either political party; there are candidates who voluntarily choose not to accept money from political action committees. So even if the donation booth never becomes as commonplace as the voting booth, candidates can always take the vow of donor anonymity. All they need to say is, "I won't ask, you don't tell."

But of course they won't. The real reforms, the ones that will change the system forever, will come only when Americans become outraged enough to force their leaders to change-or force them out of business. Indeed, when political elites cling to power even at the expense of the people's expressed will, perhaps it is time to take a lesson from the revolutionaries who founded this country, and in the spirit of that other reform-the Boston Tea Party- toss them all overboard.

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In 1998, 72.4 million citizens voted and 115.5 million eligible voters sat the election out. It was the lowest turnout since 1942, when millions of Americans were overseas fighting in World War II.

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