Politics, politics, politics.
While it seems pretty clear that there is a need to change the way we pay for political campaigns — to get the special interest (in particular, the corporate special interest) money out and to enhance participation at the grassroots — the likelihood that anything will happen, as always, is a function of the political moment.
As I report in this piece, out today on NJ Spotlight, Democrats have offered some useful campaign finance proposals. They also, as it turns out, would prefer that at least one — requiring disclosure by independent groups of their donors — not get a vote because of the impact it could have on the governor’s race.
Republicans, for their part, say they are willing to move forward with campaign finance reforms — but they have a very different definition of what they might be (target union spending and mechanisms like wheeling, the moving of money from committee to committee, that generally benefit Democrats.
All of the proposal on the table, of course, would help. We need disclosure of donors to independent groups and tighter, more global restrictions on pay-to-play that cover all levels of government. We need to limit wheeling. And we need to make sure the system is as transparent as possible.
But these remain stop-gaps, small tweaks that will leave the basic system in place. And it is the system that needs to change.
We need to encourage small donors to get involved, as this campaign is doing in New York, by matching small donations. We need public financing to limit the field and give candidates without major financial backing a shot to run. And we need to change the larger political culture, which values the opinions of big donors over voters.
I’m not naive. This is not going to be easy, but as Dena Mottola Jaborska of N.J. Citizen Action told me (quoted from my NJ Spotlight story).
“It is very expensive to run for office in this state and if you are a serious candidate you have to have a pile of cash to do so,” she said. “As a candidate, you don’t build at the grassroots or look for small donations. That is why special-interest position on issues — those who finance the campaigns — will matter more because they are the financers of the campaign.”
David Donnelly of Public Campaign Action Fund agreed.
“We have to replace the kind of dependency on big donors that exists in the current system with new dependency on regular voters,” he said. “We will still need money to run for office. But we want those people who run to have to work for it. It is a more fundamental shift — to put participation at the core, rather than just having anti-corruption at the core of our funding laws.”
Just don’t expect this to happen any time soon. Why?
As I said when I opened this post: Politics, politics, politics.
Hank Kalet 