I am reposting something I posted in response to a debate at Young Philly Politics, which began with a good post from Hannah Miller.
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There is no one solution to the campaign financing mess.
Hannah is right: we need free TV time for candidates. We also have to ban candidates who take the free time from purchasing additional media time. That would make campaigning less expensive.
But Hannah and Neil Oxman are wrong about public financing. This is one area where there really is no trade-off between spending on schools or economic development and spending on public financing of campaigns.
Claiming that public financing is too expensive is a favorite dodge of half-hearted reformers who aren’t willing to take the political risk of explaing to voters why transparent public financing makes sense.
Transparent public financing makes sense because we have hidden public financing of campaigns now. Most candidates for public office raise money from businessmen and professionals. In return, they provide favors to the businessmen and professionals who finance their campaigns. These favors dramatically raise the income of those businessmen and professionals. And then those same business and professionals then take a portion of their additional income and use that money to give candidates campaign contributions. The circle is complete.
We pay for campaigns when our government gives handouts and tax breaks to businessmen and professionals. We pay for campaigns when our government is overcharged by businessmen who have to give campaign contributions as the cost of doing business. And we pay for campaigns when our government enacts policies that give businesses a monopoly that enables them to overcharge us.
At the moment, this corrupt system is at its worst in elections to state offices. You want to know why the casinos are not only coming to our city but coming in ways that violate all sensible planning? Follow the money. You want to know why Comcast’s service is so expensive, why we can’t watch the Sixers on satellite TV and why Comcast has received $30 million for gold plated bathrooms in its knew building? Follow the money.
This corrupt system is almost as bad in the federal government. You want to know why such a ludicrous drug prescription was adopted a few years ago and why we can’t raise the fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks? Follow the money.
Councilman Goode’s legislation to limit campaign contributions put a crimp in this system. Councilman Nutter’s legislation to limit campaign contributions from those who receive no-bid contracts or other benefits from the city puts another crimp in the system.
But those reforms are ultimately going to fail, just as they have failed for Congressional elections, which are regulated by laws that are pretty much as strict as those adopted in Philadelphia. Anyone who has studied campaign finance laws can tell you how to evade or sidestep the both the Goode and the Nutter laws.
Here is one way: Instead of an individual making contributions directly to candidates, he or she can make contributions to a number of different PACs that then forward those contributions to the individual’s preferred candidates. There are many other dodges and the only reason I won’t go into them here is that I’m hoping candidates for city office won’t figure them all out before 2007 is over.
The ONLY legislative way to fix this system is public financing of campaigns. And the real cost will be negligible because a transparent system of public financing will give us more efficient and better government at lower cost than the hidden system of public financing we have now.
In addition, a transparent system of public financing will diminish the power of all those groups with money that tilt our political system, at every level of government, to the right.
So if a politician or candidate doesn’t support both free TV and public financing of campaigns, he is not a serious reformer or he is scared by the polls that show that, until public financing actually gets close to being enacted, people don’t like the idea. (You want to know whch candidates have political courage, follow their position on public financing of campaigns.)
(For more details about why we need public financing of campaigns read my testimony at a city council hearing on the subject.
One last point: fixing the campaign finance system is not enough. We still won’t have the kind of politics we want without a sustained effort to rebuild grassroots politics in America. Very little we progressives want in Philadelphia is possible without building a city wide progressive organization. So if you want reform, and haven’t already joined Neighborhood Networks, Philly for Change , and Philadelphians Against Santorum, what are you waiting for?
And when you look for candidates to support in 2007 don’t look to those who promise to be “independent.” Given how politics works, no one is truly independent. Politicians in a democracy should be dependent on the people who vote for them, not the people who give them money. Look for those candidates who recognize that progressive politicians should be responsible to and help build up grass roots political organizations.
And, yes, that last paragraph is, to use a phrase from a favorite writer, an “advertisement for myself.”