Hannah Miller has written a lovely post over at YPP about the importance of reducing the cost of our political campaigns by providing low cost television advertising. The logic of Hannah’s argument ultimately leads to the conclusion that Ray Murphy reaches in a comment on that post: Comcast ought to provide free time for political advertising as well as for televised debates and other election focused media events. (And, by the way, it really is about time that the city held Comcast to its contractual agreement to provide public access TV so that we have an alternative to corporate owned media in the city. You can read all about this issue at http://www.phillyaccess.org/.)
Comcast has a right to operate in the city because it holds a franchise that must be approved by Council. The contract that defines that franchise could be written to require free or low cost television advertising. Our Mayors and Council members have not been willing to demand what they should of Comcast. Instead they have rolled over, time and again, to Comcast’s demands.
Hannah is also right about the problems with limiting campaign contributions. Five hundred dollars is a draconian limitation, not because so many people can afford to give that much, but because campaigns are incredibly expensive, mostly but not entirely because of the costs of TV. When we limit campaign contributions to such a low amount, without reducing costs, it is much harder for anyone who cannot pay for their own campaigns to run for office.
Political scientists have argued for years, rightly I believe, that very low campaign contribution limits help Republicans defeat Democrats. There are far more Republicans than Democrats who can give $500. We Democrats have often relied on a few very wealthy liberal donors (for example, Charles Steward Mott in the seventies) who could match the large number of well-off conservative donors.
I’m not complaining about the resources we put into our politics. Why should we spend less on public discourse than we do on advertising toothpaste? There is nothing wrong with campaigns that are resource intensive, especially if more of the money is used to motivate people to get involved in politics (as campaign money was used in the pre-TV days.)
The problem is not the resources used but how the need to raise the money for them from private contributions. If something along the lines Hannah has suggested were enacted, the costs to candidates of running television advertisement would drop dramatically. Less time could be spent fundraising. And more money could go to grass roots politics.
I don’t think that lowering the costs of campaigns is the whole solution. As I have argued before we also need public financing of campaigns. Public campaign financing would help overcome the Republican advantage I mentioned above. But even without public financing of campaigns, dramatically reducing the cost of TV would be a major step towards political reform.
Let’s try to make this a major issue in the 2007 campaign. Don’t let a candidate go by without asking them whether they are ready to challenge Comcast on this