To Make The Ideal Possible

I have a friend who plans to run for office one day. This guy will be a great public servant for all the reasons he is sure to make for a controversial politician - he is eloquent, incapable of platitudes, a visionary, compassionate, and a great lover of truth. He is also the smartest person I know. When Matt (that’s my friend’s name) finishes up his Ph.D. coursework this spring - something to do with the sociology of religion - he plans to move back home from the East Coast. He’ll settle in Portland, Oregon, spend a few years in academia or the nonprofit world, and then launch his first campaign. It’ll be a grassroots revolution, by God, spurred on by Matt’s boundless optimism and an unwavering belief that good people will respond to the truth every time, if only it is offered to them.

Last summer, Matt, my other friend, Dave, and I made the long drive from New Jersey to Portland in Matt’s little Chevy Prizm. Somewhere after Omaha, we started to talk politics. Specifically, we discussed Matt’s future platform. We talked about education (Matt’s for it) and poverty (against). We wrestled over how to deal with the health care crisis and how to save Social Security. We considered the “global war on terror.” Are there ways, we wondered, to incorporate nonviolent strategies like Glen Stassen’s principles of “just peacemaking” into national policy? We debated ways to diffuse the abortion wars. We envisioned a political future for Matt that transcends traditional party politics and brings courage and excitement back to the public debate.

Still, for all of our hopefulness, we struggled to fight off a nagging pessimism. A whole cadre of courageous leaders will be needed to tackle the great challenges facing our country and the world. And there are very few stories in the morning newspaper to indicate that the current political establishment is willing to address these important issues with clarity and without fear. Politicians increasingly rely on corporations, labor unions, and other well-heeled special interest groups to help pay for campaigns that get more and more expensive with each election cycle. This places enormous pressure on policymakers to ignore the dictates of conscience and the mandates of constituents in favor of their big-budget donors.

Russell Kirk, whom Ronald Reagan once called “the prophet of American conservatism,” said that politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the ideal. But Matt, Dave, and I want to make the ideal possible. Right around the time we crossed the Continental Divide, it became clear to us: We can’t just wait around for a seismic shift in the political landscape. We have to soften the ground a bit. We have to reduce or remove the influence of money in politics. This will require campaign finance reform that goes way beyond the McCain-Feingold Bill, which increased transparency and limited soft money and “phony issue ads” (even while preserving loopholes for influential 527 groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org), but left the campaign finance system fundamentally unchanged. What is needed is a national publicly funded election system similar to those which have proven to be so successful and popular in several states and two major cities. I summarize the situation this way: When elections become less about the size of the “war chest” and more about the strength of a candidate’s character and the soundness of his or her ideas, then we will see the ascendance of democracy.

Publicly financed campaigns - or Clean Money, Clean Elections (CMCE), as they are sometimes called - are fairly straightforward. A candidate qualifies to participate in the publicly financed system by collecting a large number of very small donations (usually just $5) from individuals living within her district. Collecting a minimum number of donations is a sign of broad popularity and entitles the candidate to a certain amount of money from the public coffers. If her opponent opts out of the CMCE program and receives private donations, the clean money candidate is eligible to receive matching contributions of public money. Under some laws, the CMCE candidate is also eligible to receive contributions to match money spent to defeat her by outside groups and individuals.

According to Public Campaign, a nonpartisan organization that is working to introduce CMCE reform at the state and national level, 205 publicly financed candidates in three states were elected to state office in the 2006 campaign. These include judicial candidates in North Carolina, where three out of the four open seats on the state Supreme Court and both of the available seats on the Court of Appeals went to publicly financed candidates. Public Campaign reports that in 2004, the first year clean campaigning was available in North Carolina, just 14 percent of campaign funds statewide came from special interest groups, compared to 73 percent in 2002.

Arizona continues to be a leader in publicly financed campaigns. Both candidates for governor chose to use the CMCE system in 2006. More than a third of the new legislature will be made up of clean money candidates. Overall, 61 percent of primary candidates and 59 percent of general election candidates used public funds.

After last November’s election results were in, Maine’s new legislature was dominated by CMCE candidates, including 84 percent of the members of the new House and 83 percent of the Senate. Out of 186 races for the state legislature, only three had no publicly financed candidate. And the popularity of the system crosses party lines. Ninety-two percent of Democrats used Clean Elections. The number is slightly lower for Republicans (73 percent), Greens (64 percent) and independents (38 percent).

Posted on April 2, 2007 12:00 AM