Not for the reasons you might expect (okay, it was nice to have more hair), but for this:
Life used to be simpler.
Right and wrong seemed more clear-cut. Certainty was easier to come by, back in the days when, as I observed in introducing myself to a group the other day, I was protesting against the golf course whose fourth fairway I now overlook from my front porch.
And it seemed, as the country reeled from the Watergate scandal and the venal operations of Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President — who knew that CREEP would be such an apt acronym — that mountains of unrestricted campaign cash were buying us a ticket on the express train to perdition.
Tighten campaign finance laws, restrict big-money gifts to politicians — surely, that would help ensure more representative democracy and cleaner government.
Well, all these decades later, I’ve come, not as reluctantly as the younger me might have envisioned, to this conclusion:
Much of what we’ve tried to do in campaign finance reform in my lifetime hasn’t worked.
And perhaps it shouldn’t.
What brings this up, of course, is the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn several restrictions on campaign finance, including the ability of corporations or unions to donate money to advocacy campaigns around elections.
Many (but not all, by any means) people with whom I often take common cause are mortified and outraged by the decision. I find myself in sympathy with many, toward the right end of the political spectrum, with whom I often disagree.
This is not an issue that necessarily breaks along normal partisan lines. Consider that the American Civil Liberties Union has long opposed campaign finance restrictions on First Amendment grounds (although some board members are having second thoughts in the wake of the recent court decision.)
I often cite Kentucky’s Sen. Mitch McConnell, the fire-breathing minority leader in the Senate and a politician with a hard-earned reputation for scorched-earth campaigns for his party, and his faction’s causes.
By all rights, McConnell should have lined up in the 1990s with those conservative Republicans who urged a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. McConnell bucked his party for a simple reason:
He’s a free-speech absolutist.
So am I.
And some campaign finance reforms enacted since Watergate, well-intentioned as they were in trying to stem disquieting torrents of money to influence politics, do indeed compromise free speech.
Money, realistically, is a crucial ingredient in the ability to take part in the political process these days. Perhaps it always has been. In the early 19th century, the ability to buy more whiskey for the voters than your opponent stood you in good stead.
The emerging industrialist millionaires of the latter part of the 19th century bought more influence than did their (much) lower-income fellow citizens.
Despite that, progressive reformers reined in monopolies, elected trust-busting leaders and uncovered egregious political favor-buying.
Decades of increasingly baroque circumspections on political spending and speech have brought us dizzyingly complex rules — and years of recurring political scandal, in leaders’ public and private lives alike.
Political money is like a river. You can dam it up somewhere, redirect its channel and minimize its damage. But a year or two, a storm or two later, and the balance of power tilts.
Many of today’s troubling uses of political money are methods devised to circumvent earlier campaign-finance reform.
I’m not all that happy that bushels of money can impact a political race. But over time, I think the advantages of money even out, or are outstripped by voter anger or desire.
And I’m even less happy with the notion that John Smith — or John Smith’s business or group — can’t argue for a political position as an election nears, another technique whose curtailment last week’s court decision changed.
In the end, the best approach is full and complete disclosure of campaign finance. Sunshine is a strong antidote, perhaps the only one truly countenanced by a belief in free and unfettered speech.
Bob Ashley is editor of The Herald-Sun. Contact him at (919) 419-6678 or by e-mail at bashley@heraldsun.com.
