Commentators Jeff Wennberg and Rick Hubbard offer Two Views of recent developments in Campaign Finance Reform. Here’s Jeff Wennberg.
In a display of under whelming support, President Bush signed the Shays-Meehan campaign reform bill under cover of darkness. When asked why he signed the complicated and far-reaching legislation, the president said he thought that doubling the individual contribution limit was a good idea. This was perhaps the only provision he actually liked.
Meanwhile, Vermont’s wounded 1997 statute suffered still more abuse at the hands of it’s parents. In 2000, the principal beneficiary of public funding was Progressive gubernatorial candidate Anthony Pollina, one of the law’s principal authors. Mr. Pollina is now seeking the Lieutenant Governorship – without the benefit of public funds, because the Democrats challenged his compliance with one of the law’s requirements. In response, Pollina first sought to have the pesky requirement declared unconstitutional, but reconsidered and will now shun public funds in ’02.
This happened after Governor Dean, who signed the law, planned to wipe out the ‘public funds’ through his budget.
Most agree that indirect support – so-called ‘soft money’ – is poisonous to the democratic process. But ‘soft money’ is the result of earlier efforts to limit spending. Is it surprising that the same people who legislate the conduct of campaigns always seem to find the loophole?
Running for public office should be uncomplicated and transparent. The more we desire to regulate campaigns the more litigious our elections will become. The best reform is the one that holds the candidates accountable by raising contribution limits and requiring full and immediate disclosure.
Both the Vermont law and Shays-Meehan contain blatantly unconstitutional provisions. This allows politicians to enact sweeping reforms that are soon swept away, leaving only the pieces they will manipulate to their advantage, leaving all of us to wonder, “what went wrong?”
This is Jeff Wennberg in Rutland.
And I’m Rick Hubbard.
In the 2000 election cycle, gubernatorial candidate Anthony Pollina qualified for public financing by raising funds from what was at the time, the largest number of individual contributors to a single political candidate in the entire history of the state of Vermont! That amounted to about thirty-eight thousand dollars in amounts of less than fifty dollars each from more than sixteen hundred Vermonters.
Governor Dean raised the bar further by qualifying for public financing with small contributions that totaled about sixty-two-thousand dollars from more than twenty-two-hundred Vermonters. But Dean decided to forego public financing and went on to run a million dollar campaign, more than six-hundred-thousand dollars of which were contributed by just one-hundred and thirteen out of state contributors. Dean’s Vermont contributors outnumbered out-of-staters twenty to one, yet out-of-staters provided four and a half times more money.
Money from a wealthy few influences the election process. With more money, candidates can buy bigger megaphones to amplify their voices and drown out those of less-well-funded candidates. This discourages many good candidates who lack either the money or wealthy contacts. That gives us fewer choices.
Unfortunately, Vermont’s present law provides much less campaign money than is needed to run a competitive race. That’s probably why current candidates Shumlin, Racine, Douglas and Hogan have all recently decided it’s in their interest to raise campaign contributions privately. It’s also easy to mis-step while qualifying, as Anthony Pollina recently found out.
But properly structured, public financing can increase the number and quality of candidates and create a powerful incentive to involve more Vermonters in the political process. Vermont voters shouldn’t settle for less.
–Rick Hubbard is a writer and attorney. Jeff Wennberg is a former Mayor of Rutland.