Like Stoller, I am tired of 70's-style solutions to the problems of today's world. In this case, we're talking campaign finance reform.
Take Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, which does amazing work on corruption and is pushing for various amendments and procedural changes in how members and lobbyists relate to each other. Or Public Citizen. Or Common Cause. Or any of the good government groups. They are all pursuing the same remedies that failed in the 1970s, process reforms to restrict the flow of money into politics, sometimes on the inflow side (campaign finance) and sometimes on the outflow side (earmarks).
These reforms do not and never have worked and I'm really tired of liberal groups focusing on them as some sort of panacea. You might be able to make the argument that the Supreme Court in Buckley crippled some of these reforms, but the reality is that you can't pull money out of politics. You can't. Not gonna happen. Can't happen. Money is political, and restrictions are just another creative problem for election lawyers and lobbyists to tackle. The good ones will tell you this themselves.
Stoller's solution is public financing. I'm not sold on public financing (though I remain open to it), but fact is, the old solutions aren't working.
I would start with a wholesale revisiting of campaign finance laws which currently make it harder for regular people to run than for monied interests who can pay for election lawyers and accountants to make sense of the complex, often-contradictary campaign finance regulations.
Not to mention that much of the regulations serve to actually make campaigning more expensive. Campaign committees are forced to put up "firewalls" between various campaign efforts, like the coordinated campaign working field. It's all a complex mess, so I'm not even sure I could explain it properly.
But did you know that if Rahm Emanuel saw a poll of, say, NC-11, he couldn't share it with the coordinated campaign working the ground operation for the race in North Carolina? The ground operation would have to pay for it's own poll, rather than share an existing one paid for by another campaign legal entity. The inability to share information, besides defying logic, forced the party to pay for the same things more than once.
Another example of non-sensical bullshit brought us by the current CFR regime:
While testifying at the FEC fighting for a blogger media exemption (which we won), I sat next to Larry Noble, then-head of the Center for Responsive Politics, who was doing his best to destroy internet free speech (along with the likes of Carol Darr).
During his testimony, he was sidetracked to make the most ridiculous argument I'd ever heard -- that state parties that featured images of federal candidates on their websites would have to calculate and account for those pictures. The example he used was the Arizona Republican Party. If their website featured a picture of John McCain, the party would have to calculate the percentage of the screen real estate taken by John McCain and account that as a federal expenditure.
Not only was the demand technically impossible (just think of how screen resolutions and font sizes affect how a screen looks), but it was ridiculous on common-sense grounds. Why shouldn't the Arizona Republican Party (or any other) be able to put up a picture of their entire slate, top to bottom, without the government trying to make it difficult to do so. [Update: Adam B found the transcript of the exchange.]
Here's the problem, and I saw this up front and personal during the FEC fight with the "reformer" groups -- they've lost sight of the purpose of CFR.
In their minds, money is inherently evil. Their efforts are predicated on the impossible -- getting money out of politics. But as Stoller notes, that just ain't gonna happen, Buckley or not. All speech costs money of some sort these days. Even getting yourself to a street protest costs money (gas or transit).
So is the problem really money?
I would argue that the problem is when money is used to drown out competing voices. It was a key argument we bloggers used in defending ourselves against the "reformers" -- that while money could drown out other voices in radio or television, the inherent nature of the web meant there was no scarcity. So Haliburton couldn't use a blog to shut out or bury Daily Kos or even the smallest blogs. While Carol Darr was shrieking about the dangers posed by the dreaded Haliburton blog, we laughed and welcomed that theoretical blog into the blogosphere with open arms.
What's more, the small dollar revolution means that corporate and big money no longer dominates the political landscape. The bulk of Jim Webb's money came online, freeing him from call-time to spend time meeting with voters. He isn't beholden to corporate interests because he didn't need them to get elected. We now have the tools and mechanisms to fight back against big money and its interests.
This doesn't mean I'm advocating for a removal of contribution limits. I'm not advocating anything (yet) except a restatement of why we should regulate campaign finance, and from there, a rewrite of regulations that are internally consistent, pass the common sense test, allow maximum participation in the political process without an army of lawyers and consultants, and maximize the free speech rights we are guaranteed under the Constitution.
The outgoing Republicans showed us that the current campaign finance regulations, however well-intentioned, didn't work. They are a disaster. Time to scrap them and start over. I'd love to see a group of think tanks from the left, libertarian, and right get together and start working on a post-partisan blueprint of what this new CFR regime might look like.
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p.s. The debate over publicly financed elections is a separate matter altogether. These are two different issues, and CFR would still be relevant if we had publicly financed election (think PACs, 527s, party committees, and so on).
Update: From the comments:
I helped with a friend's state house campaign in 2004.
We had to pay the state party (a separate entity) for a voter list/database.
We could "sell" additional names back to the state party, people who we identified as new prospects.
We could not coordinate with the state senate candidate whose district coincided with our own.
We could not coordinate with our House rep, who had his own campaign. Any information he would give us would be a "contribution".
We could not coordinate with Sen. Russ Feingold's campaign. His campaign was a separate organization. (Sorry Russ, you're my man, but on this one you've got it wrong.)
We could not coordinate with John Kerry's campaign. His campaign was a separate organization.
WTF? We had FIVE separate operations on the ground! Six if we included the state party! Each hired (or got volunteers for) its own foot soldiers.
This is the root of the problem. It's ridiculous, it violates common sense, it makes races more complicated and expensive, it makes things annoying and confusing for voters, and it does nothing to root out the problem the regulations are attempting to address.