How to fix campaign financing forever for $50
A radical proposal by two Yale professors goes far beyond any reform envisaged by Feingold or McCain.
By Farhad Manjoo
Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Campaign Finance, Opinion, Farhad Manjoo, Barack Obama, 2008 election
Feb. 5, 2007 | We don't yet know whether the next president will be a man, a woman, white or black, but we know this much: On Inauguration Day, he or she will be gravely indebted to many very wealthy people. Sen. Hillary Clinton has already decided to fund her presidential campaign entirely through private donations, and her rivals are likely to follow that approach. The serious candidates are looking to raise $100 million this year alone, and the two who win the primaries will take in substantially more. That's an average of at least $2 million a week, or $286,000 every day, including weekends, until the election -- greater than the median price of a new American home.
The news is dispiriting to anyone who cares about clean politics, but it's not surprising. Today's campaign finance regulations are as effective as abstinence vows on prom night, and the leading proposals to fix the system do little more than impose some decorum on the bacchanalia. This week Sen. Russell Feingold, just about the last politician in the nation who can still muster any fervor on the issue, offered a plan that would modestly tweak the current system, increasing some public funding here and eliminating some limits there. The plan's prospects look uncertain. His former co-conspirator in reform, John McCain, says he's not even familiar with Feingold's idea, perhaps because as a presidential candidate he now spends much of his time asking rich people for money. But even if Feingold's plan did become law, it would do nothing about the fundamental problem. Running for office takes an enormous amount of money, and even though "You" may be Person of the Year, drunk on the power of "your" blogs and "your" YouTube, politicians will always be able to get more money from "Them," the fat cats.
But reforming the system doesn't have to be a pipe dream. In fact, there's already a plan out there that would work. The proposal, which was outlined a couple of years ago by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres, two professors at Yale Law School, is nonpartisan, constitutional and completely contrary to nearly every orthodoxy in the campaign finance reform movement. Think of it as the best campaign finance reform proposal you've never heard of.
The first part of the Ackerman-Ayres plan calls on the government to give every voter $50 to donate to candidates running for federal office. The second part will sound almost as crazy, until it sounds brilliant: Make all campaign donations secret, so that nobody -- especially political candidates -- knows where any citizen's money is going. Anonymous giving means no quid pro quo.
To understand what's so truly inspired about this proposal, you first have to understand what's wrong with today's laws. The current regulations were put in place to counter the abuses uncovered during the Watergate investigation, things like the Committee to Re-elect the President's maintenance of secret slush funds for dirty tricks. They mainly limit how much money individuals can donate to candidates and how much candidates can spend to win office. In return for abiding by spending limits, politicians get public matching funds -- that is, money from the government -- to mount their campaigns.
This may seem like a sensible approach, but Ackerman and Ayres suggest that it is fundamentally flawed. Capping how much money people can give to candidates only invites ways to get around those limits. Getting around the limits has become a huge Washington business, employing battalions of lawyers and lobbyists. Limits simply don't limit much -- every election sees more private donations to candidates, and more money spent on campaigns.
Conservatives often argue that there's nothing wrong with candidates collecting all this money so long as they fully disclose it. Newt Gingrich, for example, wants politicians to have to post to the Web receipt of all donations within 24 hours of cashing the check. But we are already drowning in disclosure -- go to OpenSecrets.org to feast on a smorgasbord of candidates' funding sources -- and it has hardly changed a thing. Public knowledge of politicians' funders perhaps deters the worst kind of influence peddling, outright bribery. But disclosure does nothing to stem more pervasive forms of favor trading. There is no better illustration of this than the current president, who won his office thanks to wheelbarrows of cash from business interests, notably the oil and gas industry, a sector few Americans hold in high regard. Public awareness of who backed George W. Bush has not mitigated his willingness to act in accordance with those backers' interests. As Slate's Timothy Noah recently observed, sometimes sunlight just isn't so great a disinfectant.
When you mention these difficulties to reformers, they often respond by suggesting the most radical change of all: complete public financing of elections. Under this plan, the government would pick up the entire tab for candidates' electioneering efforts. While that has obvious benefits -- public money frees up candidates to focus on policies rather than fundraising, and it leaves them beholden to no one -- there is one huge drawback. The public is opposed. The current system of public matching funds is paid for by taxpayers who check off a box on their tax forms directing $3 to candidates. In the 1970s, more than a third of taxpayers checked off the box. Now, only 1 in 10 do, and the number is dropping. If the people aren't willing to direct $3 to candidates, how can we expect them to go for anything more?
It's here that we come to what's great about the Ackerman-Ayres plan: It offers the public a reason to support public financing. Today, people have no say in how their $3 is spent. Under the new plan, anyone who registered to vote would receive $10 to donate to House candidates, $15 to Senate candidates and $25 to presidential candidates. They could make their pledges essentially any way they chose. They could fund long shots or front-runners, spend their wads in the primary or the general election, in their home state or across the nation. They could split their allotments among dozens of contenders or just choose one Senate candidate, one House candidate and one presidential candidate. They could not cheat and spend the money on dinner. The $50 would be issued as a kind of electronic voucher that would expire on Election Day, and Ackerman and Ayres suggest that people could register their donations using the Web, ATM machines or even their electronic food stamp cards.
About 120 million people voted for president in 2004. At $50 each, that would be $6 billion in public financing available for candidates, more than enough to fund big campaigns. As a comparison, all federal candidates -- for the House, the Senate and the presidency -- spent a combined $4 billion in 2004, most of it raised from private donors. Such sums would profoundly alter the political process. Today, Ackerman and Ayres point out, many Americans participate in politics only at the end of a long campaign, if they do at all. Fifty dollars isn't a fortune, but it's more than most voters give. By pooling the money, candidates would be forced to recognize issues of real importance and campaign in places they might otherwise deem pointless to visit. In search of donations, Republicans might even come to San Francisco.