They must be reading you, as the ethically-challenged AlGore tries to hide:
September 14, 1999
Governor Bush's Web Listing
We wonder if the campaign-reform movement actually thought it would reach the promised land before the Internet rolled past them, as it has everything else. Late last week, Governor George W. Bush announced he was going to post all his campaign contributors on the Web. It's all there, across hundreds of pages to occupy reporters and other political obsessives. And tomorrow the House will, once again, debate the Shays-Meehan campaign-finance reform bill to restrict political contributions in a way most legal scholars agree would be found at least partly unconstitutional if it ever became law.
The two approaches spring from completely different views of human nature. After Watergate, the Common Cause-Ralph Nader model of "reform" triumphed and has dominated our campaign laws ever since. This is the instinctive control freak's vision of politics: Government can and should decide who speaks in elections and how much, and somehow the controllers will keep pace with the constantly changing political marketplace.
There wouldn't be any debate if the reforms had worked. Instead they've produced a political landscape littered with exhausted candidates, candidacies unlaunched and years of adverse court rulings. Sailing straight into the wind of this failure, Shays-Meehan believes that soft-money donations that were spawned by the Watergate reforms should be banned and issue ads by independent groups regulated by the Federal Election Commission.
The Supreme Court and over a dozen lower courts have held that campaign giving and spending are forms of political speech protected by the First Amendment. Just last week, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken, a Clinton appointee, threw out San Francisco's strict limits on how much "independent expenditure" campaigns can have in local elections. She cited the many court precedents that link political speech with free speech.
It looks to us as if Governor Bush has just abandoned this sterile debate to seize the future. Unlike the Common Cause model, his Web posting doesn't dream the impossible dream of expunging money from politics, but instead tries to give voters, of all things, information.
He supports both instant disclosure and making it easier for candidates to raise money from a diverse group of donors. He notes that the current limit on individual contributions was set at $1,000 in the disco era now depicted on Fox TV in "That '70s Show." It hasn't been increased for inflation since 1974. The incredible amount of time it takes to raise a campaign budget in $1,000 increments has caused many candidates to abandon all hope of running for federal office.
Last week alone produced two significant casualties. Republicans lost Governor Christie Whitman as a Senate candidate in part due to the grind of fundraising. A day later, Democrats saw Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa leave that state's U.S. Senate race. She called the political process a game that "rewards those who will spend hours and hours each day raising money, rather than seeking solutions."
One way to keep quality candidates such as these from dropping out is to raise the long-frozen $1,000 contribution limit. If that limit had just kept pace with a quarter century of inflation, Governor Whitman and Attorney General Del Papa might have been able to spend less time raising more money. Does anyone really believe that a typical Senate candidate who raises $10 million would sell his vote for a mere $4,000 if the limit were raised?
"Americans will be able to look for themselves to find out who is helping to fund my campaign," Mr. Bush said in announcing his daily posting of contributions on his Web site. Larry Makinson of the liberal Center for Responsive Politics called Mr. Bush's move "three-quarters of a step in a very good direction."
While Mr. Bush's Web site list of contributors is comprehensive, it obviously needs a search engine for research purposes. It's striking, though, that news reports said few other presidential candidates were likely to do the same. We certainly hope Gov. Bush asks all of them over and over why not. What's to hide, Mr. Vice President? We can see why Mr. Gore might not have wanted to list everyone on the Web during the last election cycle, but hey, let's all try to make a clean break with the past.
Instead, the Gore campaign put out that the Bush initiative was just a "token." And clearly the Beltway establishment is miffed that the governor has stolen a march on their most hallowed crusade. The fact is that one candidate has done something we're supposed to believe no politician would want to do -- display his contributors for the whole world to see. Nits aside, what's the problem?
interactive.wsj.com
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