Hung Up in Washington, part 2/2
3.
One of the mysteries of the 2004 election is how large a part money will have in determining the next president. President Bush has amassed about $100 million and is aiming for an unprecedented $200 million. As in 2000, he's rejecting federal matching funds, which would require limits on spending. So are John Kerry and Howard Dean. Thus, the campaign finance law, the central reform put in place after Watergate, that specifically provides federal matching funds for presidential campaigns, has been weakened severely, if not fatally. Partly as a result, some candidates will have far more money available for campaign advertising and other activities, such as getting out the vote, than others. Still, though much is made of the importance of ads in political campaigns there's no way to precisely measure their impact. The pollsters, consultants, and ad producers, who stand to make many millions of dollars, nevertheless warn their clients that they must run a large number of ads or lose the election.
Bush has never liked the idea of campaign finance reform, though he had to pretend to during the 2000 primaries (when John McCain was challenging him) and when the campaign finance reform bill was going through Congress under McCain's leadership. But he tried to undermine McCain's efforts to pass the bill. In fact, few elected officials favor reform, but many of them feel they have to pretend that they do because of the strength of the reform movement among swing voters. Nevertheless, they try, through devious maneuvers, to weaken or even kill the legislation as it moves through Congress.
The ruling of the Supreme Court in December upholding the McCain-Feingold law passed by Congress in 2002 was of great consequence, even though it didn't require changes in the way the candidates were conducting their campaigns because the new law had already gone into effect in November 2002. (Bush signed it into law reluctantly and even secretly, excluding McCain from the signing in March 2002.) The law abolished "soft money" —unlimited contributions to candidates by individuals, corporations, or labor unions—and placed some curbs on broadcast ads that are called "issue" ads but that in fact attack candidates. The new law barred the use of corporate or union funds to pay for such ads thirty days before a primary and sixty days before an election.
Still, under the new law, "issue" ads can be paid for by aggregating "hard money"—individual donations by contributors of $2,000—or by a political action committee, or PAC, to which contributions of $5,000 can be made. There is no limit on the amount of "hard money" a PAC can spend for such ads. But there are various limits on the total amount individuals can donate to campaigns for federal office in each electoral cycle. The law also makes it illegal for federal officeholders to raise soft money.
In upholding the law, the Court rejected the impassioned argument of opponents of reform that the new law (and virtually every campaign finance reform law) infringed the First Amendment because, so it was argued, in making donations, citizens were exercising their right of free speech. Some who opposed the law and earlier bills on constitutional grounds were expressing a sincerely held view; for others the constitutional argument has been a useful cover for opposing any limits on raising or spending campaign money or on curbing bogus "issue" ads that are actually ads attacking a candidate, sometimes with mysterious funding.
The curb on broadcasting was considered the most vulnerable part of the bill. The Supreme Court held that there were ample precedents in prior decisions and examples of corruption in political conduct to abolish soft money and to place restrictions on sham issue ads. Moreover, as the bill's backers carefully drafted it and guided it through Congress, they had two criteria: that Congress would approve it and that it would be held constitutional. In doing so, they made compromises, but they nevertheless enacted a significant reform bill.
In taking the steps they did, Congress, and then the Supreme Court, put an end to, or at least severely limited, the "shakedown": the implicit, and sometimes explicit, understanding that there will be favors in exchange for a contributor's money, whether access to a candidate, a call to a regulatory agency, or consideration of a contributor's interests when it comes time for congressional votes. They can affect regulations by the numerous federal agencies. Contributions may influence whether a bill will be considered and what it will contain.
The concern for raising money indisputably affects the votes of elected officeholders. Dick Durbin, the Democratic senator from Illinois, candidly told me a few years ago that when he went to the floor, he couldn't avoid thinking about how his vote might affect future contributions. In Washington, access, or the illusion of it, is practically everything. It's the beginning point for achieving one's purposes. The shakedowns could take the form of a conversation or something more elaborate and head-spinning: the $50,000 "coffees" and sleepovers during the Clinton administration; cruises; golfing weekends.
On the face of it, one would be tempted to conclude that the Bush administration, sympathetic as it is to corporate interests, is no less corrupt than Clinton's in skewing policy in the anticipation of, or as a reward for, contributions; but Trevor Potter, a former chairman of the Federal Election Committee and now head of the pro-reform Campaign Legal Center, argues that the Bush administration's policies in favor of business arise from genuine beliefs, not corruption. He points out that the highest officials, Bush and Cheney, come from the corporate world and have been formed by it. The Bush administration's actions in cutting taxes, gutting regulations, and doing large favors for the energy, coal, steel, and drug industries, Potter argues, have been propelled by a pro-business ideology, and, in the case of the coal and steel industries, also by the desire to win votes in crucial industrial states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and West Virginia). That's not corruption; it's American democracy as we know it. The result is that the rich and powerful have more access and influence than ordinary citizens. That certain industries raise a great deal of money for Bush, Potter says, is a result of the policies that the administration follows, not the impetus for them. "When they want to do energy policy they summon the energy companies because that's who they know and where they're coming from," Potter told me recently.
Yet now, with individual donations strictly limited, candidates for office may still feel beholden to people who gather a large number of $2,000 or lesser contributions from employees, friends, and the names in their rolodexes. The 2000 Bush campaign had its "Pioneers," who raised $100,000. Now Bush has added a new category, Rangers, who raise $200,000. Such "bundling" is not illegal, but reformers' efforts to abolish it have been blocked, mainly by congresswomen who are protecting EMILY'S List, which backs pro-choice Democratic women running for office. So large fund-raisers are still courted, flattered, and appointed, and reformers will continue to press for outlawing "bundling."
Already various groups have been formed by close allies of both political parties, to act as conduits for large contributions to candidates for the 2004 election. (Democrats have set up The Media Fund, run by longtime Clinton loyalist Harold Ickes, and America Coming Together; Republicans have established Americans for a Better Country and the Leadership Forum.) Reformers have filed a court case arguing that such dummy committees are illegal. (The Republicans' outrage over contributions of more than ten million dollars by the financier George Soros to groups backing Democrats is a splendid example of political hypocrisy.[5] )
McCain and the other sponsors of the new campaign finance law foresaw that there would be efforts to get around it, but they consider finance reform a continuing process in which reformers try to fix the most blatant problems; and then, when a new problem arises and a consensus can be formed that something must be done, they move on to the new one. Though the reformers can take satisfaction from what they have achieved so far, they know that they already have new problems to deal with.
Unlike 2000, this time the voters know that it matters a great deal who is elected president. Almost everything the federal government does, therefore every citizen, is affected. The President has formidable advantages: the constant publicity that comes with occupying the White House; vast amounts of money; the power to affect at least some events; the ability to perform what may be convincing stunts. He may have lucky breaks, such as the capture of bin Laden, before the election.
Bush's denigrators to the contrary, he isn't dumb. He is inarticulate, uncurious, and anti-intellectual, to be sure, but also shrewd in limited but important ways: in meetings he is said to go quickly to the main point,[6] and he's a very effective politician. According to polls, much of the public finds him genial and easygoing, which is a political advantage, even if it's a deceptive impression. Like his mother, who also puts on a good show, Bush is tough on those around him and he can be mean. One often hears the fuzzy proposition that many Americans want to like their president and that, with some exceptions, they usually vote for the seemingly more likable candidate.
Still, Bush is not at this stage unbeatable: his foreign and economic policies have stirred widespread opposition. According to John Zogby's polling, even after the capture of Saddam Hussein only 45–47 percent of respondents said they would vote to reelect him—not at all a good sign for a supposedly popular president. A great deal will depend on unpredictable events.
—January 14, 2004
Notes
[1] See my article on Rove, "The Enforcer," The New York Review, May 1, 2003.
[2] Santorum stated in April 2003 that if the Supreme Court says you have the right to gay sex "within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."
[3] For a view of a different Senate at a different time, see Don Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great American Statesman and Diplomat (Smithsonian Books, 2003).
[4] For a fascinating history of how the House has developed, see Nelson W. Polsby, How Congress Evolves: Social Bases of Institutional Change (Oxford University Press, 2003).
[5] For Soros's angry indictment of the Bush administration's foreign and anti-terrorist policies, see his recent book, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power (Public Affairs, 2003).
[6] For a contrasting view, see the comments of Paul O'Neill, former secretary of the treasury, in Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty (Simon and Schuster, 2004). |
