Here's a man of great courage. The lib hate groups are after him:
September 17, 1999
Campaign-Finance Reform
Meets Its Match
By PAUL A. GIGOT
One of Washington's stock characters is the conservative who becomes the source of all political evil.
Ronald Reagan played this vital role until he proved too popular with voters. John Sununu took over for a while and was succeeded by Newt Gingrich, but their forced exile has left the left forlorn. So it's time to welcome Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell as the next national piñata.
The three-term Republican has the two qualities essential for any serious Beltway villain. First, he dissents from some holy liberal writ, in his case the cult of "campaign-finance reform." Second, and far more important, he's politically successful. Liberals can forgive the first, but for the second he is going to have to pay.
Which is why you'll be reading a lot about Mr. McConnell in the next month. Restrictions on political speech (oops, "campaign reform") passed the House this week, so Mr. McConnell is now going to have to kill them again in the Senate as he has since 1994. Specifically, he'll lead a filibuster, if he must, that will send Democrats and their media acolytes into a polemical rage.
Target practice is under way. "I think of him as the Darth Vader of campaign-finance reform," leading Naderite Ellen Miller likes to say.
Common Cause, the conscience of Manhattan's Upper West Side, describes the senator in a fund-raising letter as "a new type of Public Enemy #1" who promotes "a massive money laundering scheme." The letter urges devotees to keep the senator's photograph in their checkbooks to remind them of his wickedness.
This last is especially funny, because the New York Times recently ran a story accusing Mr. McConnell of going "beyond the usual hyperbole" in one of his GOP fund-raising letters. The damning evidence? A quote from Fred Wertheimer, former head of Common Cause!
The Times in particular seems to have it in for Mr. McConnell, with editorials and news stories combining as a tag team to portray him as "thuggish," as one editorial delicately put it.. First its reporters uncover something they portray as nefarious, then an editorial hammers him for "thuggish" behavior.
One recent page one bombshell reported that Mr. McConnell had--brace yourself--written a tart letter to businessmen who belong to a minor association that has endorsed public financing of elections. How dare he express an opinion! Mr. McConnell was then denounced far and wide (The Hartford Courant: "Mr. McConnell, The Bully") in the echo chamber of independent liberal thought.
The good news is that the senator seems to have a thicker hide than either Messrs. Sununu or Gingrich. Mr. McConnell feels the sting, but his usual response is to keep cool and get even. In other words, he has conservative convictions but liberal tenacity.
"What really drives them crazy is that they know that I really know this subject," says the man who also runs the GOP Senate campaign committee. "They know that when I say the Supreme Court and the ACLU agree with me, I'm right."
"Reformers" also know that if they can make Mr. McConnell politically radioactive, some of his more timid GOP colleagues might break away. Many House Republicans voted for liberal reform this week because they figured it'll never get past Stonewall McConnell; so it was a free vote.
Senate reformers are also changing strategy by dropping the House's worst free-speech restrictions, at least for now. That leaves a ban on "soft money" -- large, unrestricted donations to political parties.
Mr. McConnell still isn't moved. "This makes it even more apparent that this is really all about unilateral Republican disarmament," he says. GOP soft money is essential, he adds, to answer the tens of millions of dollars spent by unions, the Sierra Club and trial lawyers on TV ads and phone calls backing Democrats.
"No business group is willing to operate like a political party, which is what unions do" with union dues, the senator says, and he's surely right in the short term. All the more so because without GOP soft money, the left-leaning media would have even more election influence. Maybe this is the real motive for the Times' jihad.
In the longer run, however, business would find some other way to influence campaigns, probably with issue-ads of its own, so a soft-money ban would merely be a finger in the dike. In the name of reducing the clout of special interests, the reformers would actually increase it.
At least Mr. McConnell is honest about his partisanship. He plays to win. When Democrats act this way they are celebrated as clever, principled pols. Where was the media outrage when George Mitchell used filibusters to kill George Bush's domestic agenda?
Democrats were happy to break the finance laws to prevail in 1996, only to find religion now that they think "reform" is a winner in 2000. Too bad they're probably wrong. As Mr. McConnell tells wavering colleagues, no one has ever won or lost an election over campaign-finance. As a voting issue, it's right up there with bankruptcy reform.
But to a certain kind of liberal moralist, it remains the eternal flame. Which is why it will keep coming back, as the Kentuckian puts it, "like Glenn Close in the bathtub in 'Fatal Attraction.' " Friends of free speech should be grateful Mr. McConnell is around to defeat it, again.
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