Arizona senator and presumptive GOP presidential nominee
John McCain can trace his maverick reputation to a number of things, but
perhaps most glaringly to his work with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., in the area
of campaign finance reform. The two spearheaded the Bipartisan Campaign Reform
Act of 2002, which sought to eliminate soft money contributions to political
parties and prevent groups from airing phony issue ads in the days leading up
to an election.
The impetus for the unlikely McCain-Feingold pairing was a
shared belief that private money played too large of a role in politics. ?We
all recognized one very simple truth ? that campaign contributions from a
single source that run to the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars are
not healthy to a democracy,? Mr. McCain said on the Senate floor shortly before
the bill passed.
Given this history, there is quite a bit of irony in Mr.
McCain’s announcement this week that he will not accept matching campaign funds
from the government. The decision frees him to spend as much money as he wishes
throughout the presidential primary election.
BCRA didn’t alter the public funding system (which was
created in the 1970s), but if Mr. McCain is so concerned about the corrosive
effect of money in politics, wouldn’t you expect him to lead by example and
accept public financing? You’d think he would almost have to. But forced with
the option of choosing between public funds tied to a spending limit or
unlimited private cash, the senator opted for the latter.
In Mr. McCain’s defense, he’s not alone in failing to live
up to his campaign finance rhetoric. Barack Obama, the frontrunner for the
Democratic presidential nomination, also says he supports public financing of
elections. For instance, he is a co-sponsor of the Fair Elections Now Act,
which would establish a public financing system for U.S. Senate elections. Yet
when it came time for the Illinois senator to decide whether to accept federal
matching funds for his primary campaign, he too opted out in order to raise unlimited
private donations.
Now bringing in almost $1 million per day, it’s nearly
impossible to argue against Mr. Obama’s decision. Other major presidential
candidates in recent elections, including Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Ron
Paul, Howard Dean, John Kerry and George W. Bush have made the same choice to
forego matching funds in the primary election, and it’s safe to say none
regretted the decision.
This is the folly of the public campaign financing system.
No smart candidate, not even one supposedly committed to campaign finance
reform, will voluntarily agree to limit his or her spending in exchange for
public money if he or she could earn and spend more with private donations.
Hence, there are really only two ways to ensure a public
financing system works. The first would be to make it coercive, to force
candidates to take the funds and abide by the spending limits that come
attached with the money. But this would be an unconstitutional infringement on
candidates’ free speech rights, as the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo made
clear. The second would be to set the public funds and spending limit so high
as to make it nearly impossible to raise similar amounts from private sources.
The public financing scheme for the presidential general
election actually has reflected this second scenario. Since the system’s
inception in the 1970s, every presidential nominee from the two major parties
has accepted public funds in the general election. They in turn agreed to not
raise or spend private donations between the party’s nomination convention and
Election Day. For each candidate, the public money has always just been too
much to turn down.
It is starting to look as though 2008 will continue the
trend, though only because of a poor decision on the part of Mr. Obama. Last
March, he agreed with Mr. McCain that if the two won their parties’ respective
nominations, they would both accept public financing in the general election.
Mr. Obama would never make this deal today because he could earn far more from
private sources than the $85 million that will be available to him from the
government. If Mr. McCain holds the Illinois senator to the deal ? and he’d be
foolish not to ? Mr. Obama will not be able to take advantage of his
fundraising prowess in the general election. The two (assuming they win the
nominations) would be on equal financial footing.
Future candidates will learn from Mr. Obama’s mistake. This
election will be the last in which the presidential candidates accept money
from the government in the general election.
Though some will lament the demise of the public financing
system, it seems most taxpayers will not. Indeed, they are the ones who
hastened the downfall. The system is funded entirely through people marking
check-off boxes on tax returns, and fewer and fewer people are choosing to do
so. They’ve recognized there are far better uses of taxpayer money than
engaging in political speech ? something private individuals and organizations
are more than capable of creating themselves.
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Ryan Masse ([email protected])
is a first-year law student.
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