Enhancing the value of small donations sounds good, but it will not be enough. We should also work to reduce campaign spending. The greatest expenditures are on broadcast advertising. Broadcasters are licensed by the public. We can change the terms of their licenses so the stations are required to give blocks of time to the FEC. Let's make it for a fairly brief period of time before each election, so maybe we can shorten the campaign season while we're at it. All of a sudden, the FEC has some very nice carrots to hand out to the candidates who decide to play by the rules. The only real negative impact is to broadcaster profits, but they can afford it, and it couldn't happen to a bunch of nicer guys.

Find a way to repeal the "money = speech" gift to the wealthy; barring that, enact laws that tax lobbying firms that lobby for "for profit" entities, repeal tax deductibility for contributions to lobbying firms that lobby for "for profit entities", repeal any tax deductions for political candidates and parties.

or

Go to your Plan B :)

PS: I like the idea of public financing.

one thing i'll say about edwards is that he's is in favor of public campaign financing. the others? don't know.

I have become, in the past couple of years, a pessimist on this topic. Even if you have public financing of campaigns -- a necessary first step in my view -- there will still be corporations with billions of dollars to spend and massive economic incentives to find a way to use that money (it's just another investment for them, after all), to shape public policy. If they can't do it by directly buying politicians, they will find ways to use the money to directly influence public opinion.

What I fear here is that meaningful front end reforms locking out old school corruption will result in the birth of institutional-level Scaifism: corporate financing of nominally money-losing media ventures that amount to nothing more than propaganda. As sophisticated as advertising and PR have become in the past few decades, such a scenario is more dangerous than the relatively open corruption we currently have. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity underwritten (through a dozen shell corporations and non-profits, of course) by Exxon-Mobil.

In times of peace, the wise man prepares for war. -- Horace

The blade itself incites to violence. -- Homer

The comments above by Luigi, BevD & epistemology are correctly seeing the forest for the trees in my opinion. But Mark Schmitt in his ideas is at least not trying to ignore that forest either.

If you regulate what can be done in election campaigns, everyone with an agenda will just go outside of campaigns and try to influence that way. PAC's were created in response to campaign finance reform.

On my local TV station the other night, New York One, I heard that the New York state health care unions banded together with the hospitals and some insurance companies to spend $100 million in advertising & lobbying to defeat Governor Spitzer's attempt at Medicaid budget cuts! 100 million on a single issue, a budget cut, nothing to do with an election!

We have free speech which allows those with money to buy a printing press as it were & those without the money to band together to afford one. The savviest guy/group as to getting money and making a resounding message wins, was ever thus. Don't see how the internet is going to change that over TV, it's just going to be a case of a message on the home page of the most popular sites or portals eventually costing a fortune.

Money buys the ability to influence & the more communication methods, the more opportunity to influence. You can't get around that.

I was really intrigued for a moment byby JohnW1141's idea of "for profit" exclusion, but then I thought for a moment and remembered: how expensive is it going to be to really truly continually police the funding sources for non-profit PAC type groups? And how detrimental will that be to free speech? Big Brother enters in at some point.

P.S. Also, on the "corruption" end, you do get into an "eye of the beholder" problem sometimes. I get the impression that many on this website think Joe Biden corrupt for pandering to some of the desires of the Delaware credit card industry, and just a few days ago so many were upset that Rep. Wexler was "pandering" to AIPAC.

The problem is that sometimes voting constituents might like some of that "corrupt" pandering, they might actually expect Joe Biden to make sure the credit card industry is happy to do biz in their state and Wexler might know likewise what his constituents expect from him on the matter of Israel.

but then I thought for a moment and remembered: how expensive is it going to be to really truly continually police the funding sources for non-profit PAC type groups?

Ironically, it may turn a profit, if you consider what we're paying now, directly and indirectly. :)

And how detrimental will that be to free speech? Big Brother enters in at some point.

Free speech would still exist, the first part of my post mentioned repealing the "money = speech" ruling somehow.

I agree, its the monkey wrench thrown into the works, keeeping Big Brother at bay.

I see no evidence that term limits have done a thing about the influence of money on state and local politics in New York. They just remove some processes and people from the influence of elections. Besides, we can strive to control money without amending the constitution, although I agree that the "money = speech" ruling is a huge, unforgiveable obstacle.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

JohnW1141 said:

Perhaps each State gets an amount proportional to State population, then split the it 50/50 between candidates.
Naturally this needs more work.

Same funding for Independents and upstart Parties?

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Democratic Candidate for US Senate, Wisconsin 2012

good point...

On the local level, the experience of the last two federal campaign cycles, contrasting sharply with a statewide election with completely different rules in the off-year between, bore out the dire warning of the California Democratic Party that caused them to join the Republicans' lawsuit against the McCain-Feingold law: It has made local party organizations all but meaningless.

Local party committees are forbidden to do registration drives within 120 days out from a federal primary or general election. In Virginia, that means in a federal year we have the two weeks following the mid-June primary for such activity -- period.

We are forbidden to do any kind of spending to put out a generic Democratic message or GOTV activity other than face-to-face, even if we're not mentioning the federal candidates by name or office: no radio, no newspaper ads, no high school football programs, no billboards, no leaflets, no phone banks from our office or on phones we pay for. All of that can only be done by the campaigns themselves, or with materials they provide. A clear edge for campaigns rich enough to provide materials, but even then they're not going to be locally tailored.

Without email, currently exempted, we'd be cooked. These rules kill any role for party activity in small, rural areas, where the advantages of local knowledge are greatest and where (because of small numbers of voters and marginal performance) only the most cash-laden campaigns will ever spend money on such things.

The contrast with our 2005 governor /lt. governor / attorney general / state legislative campaigns, where we could do all these things as long as we kept records of our spending, was instructive. Our only role in the federal campaign system anymore is to raise money.

And yet these are the exactly the kinds of localities where party activity and visibility can make big gains. The effects of these restrictions must be even more agonizing for comparable communities in states with statewide elections during federal campaign years (the majority).

It's a disgrace, and it needs to be reversed in time to keep our hands from being completely tied in 2008. But I doubt it will be.

The specific reform that could change all that is to allow local committees to take part in and spend freely on campaign activities as long as the money is raised locally. We shouldn't have to form a federal campaign committee and commit ourselves to reporting every 30 days into eternity just to raise and spend about $20,000, as long as we raise and spend it locally.

Campaign finance reform is largely a fraud. It is a public relations racket designed to distract people from the fundamental issues of social and economic inequality by perpetuating the illusion that the problem of power can be addressed independently of the problem of wealth.

You can't erect a wall between wealth and power because wealth is power. The things people possess - the things we describe as "wealth" - are the things people desire. So to possess something is to have control over the objects of desire, and the more your possessions are desired, the more wealth you have. And clearly, if you control the objects of people's desires you thereby control those people.

So wealth finds a way; it will always find a way. It flows inevitably into exchanges, and these include exchanges involving special political governmental consideration. No matter what gaps are plugged and what walls are erected, it takes about half a second for wealth to work out a new route through them, over them and around them.

The only way to do something about the unequal influence over government is to do something about the underlying social and economic inequality itself.

Yes, it will. So the only solution is to counter wealth per capita with the solidarity of wealth in numbers. If for example, the combined wealth of the bottom 75% is equal to that of the top 25%, then the bottom 75% can be an effective coalition for redistributing wealth downward from that top 25% group.

The suggestion you are thinking of is from a book by Ackerman & Ayres, "Voting with Dollars." There are two parts of their plan. One part is to provide a fund so that every registered voter would receive on average $50 every presidential election year, $25 every year their senatorial candidate presented himself, and $10 every two years for their Representative. A little over $15 per year. The second part is to have a pool into which donors put their money anonymously and have three days to change who it goes to, or perhaps to withdraw it. This would sever the quid pro quo. Candidates would never really know who gave them money or if a promised amount was actually deposited. The donor would have less grounds to trust that any promises would be delivered on since the candidate could not know if the money was in fact proferred.

Their logic is that in the 19th century, elections were public and this led to rampant vote buying and ballot stuffing. With the advent of the right to a private ballot, the system cleaned up immediately.

I disagree with the authors that this would mean that you don't need limits. A large enough donation would by its very existence be somewhat traceable. But probably not a $2000 donation.

I also like clean money elections, but they might actually take more civic pressure, and have more details to work out, and with the current decline in civic activity, I am not optimistic that many more states will have the political will to risk losing their power, i.e. giving up their incumbant protection racket, to make the necessary changes.

And by all means require the media to cover the elections. It's the least they can do, given that they are not bothering to give us the news.

RJB writes

One suggestion I have heard that I like is to require that all campaign contributions be anonymous. Memory fails on where I heard this idea but as I recall the legality and practical implementation of such a law was addressed.  

If the anonymity proposed is to establish a firewall between donors and the candidates or parties receiving the donations, I can see some merit to the idea, but it would mean the end of $1,000.00 a plate dinners.  (That might not be a bad thing... lots of rubber chickens would have their lives saved).

If there are insurmountable obstacles to this kind of anonymity, then I might entertain the opposite idea:  no anonymity in the funding of political operations.  I could accept the idea of corporate contributions if the names of the corporations and the officers authorizing the contributions were available freely an in a timely fashion.  If I held stock in such corporations, I could raise a firestorm at the next meeting or mount a challenge to the board.  If I didn't hold stock in the corporation, I could refuse to patronize it.  I visit Buy Blue now, to get some idea of which commercial enterprises are friendly to my interests and which are not.  This introduces at least a measure of economic democracy in my decision making.

The same, of course, would also be true of unions, or the non-profits which have sprung up as a way around the campaign reform initiatives.  Make them transparent too.  Publish names of donors to them, and publish names of the members of their boards who authorize funds to what campaigns. 

Some of this apparatus is in operation already.  Unfortunately an upgrade seems to have swallowed my bookmarks on my office machine, but I remember a website last election cycle where I could punch in a zip code and get a distribution map of contributions, color coded, with amounts included, and I found this absolutely fascinating.

There would have to be safeguards included...the practice of bundling contributions ended, for one thing, and prohibitions against retaliation for contributions employees might make to causes with which their organizations disagree.  But given my choice between an unenforceable anonymity and a complete transparency, I think I come down on the side of the latter. 

aMike

I think the Clinton "apology issue" is something cranked up by the media.

Nope. 

You admitted you have the kind of sense of humor which makes me grin for several minutes, and then return to that grin a wee bit later for an encore. 

aMike

hmmm, I've mostly seen it promoted on the "liberal blogmedia." I haven't seen anyone go as far as "Hillary Clinton, war criminal" yet, but I must say I wouldn't be surprised if I do, it's gotten close.

Paul W

In the past matching funds have been used to weed out candidates that weren't serious contenders without having to subjectively evaluate which candidates to fund. I.e., third party candidates are also able to acquire matching funds.

What if the matching funds limit were altered to be dynamic, rather than static? E.g., that limit could be set to the money spent by the most profligate candidate. If candidate A has raised $200 million for their campaign chest, candidate B has raised $130 million, and candidate C has raised $75 million, then candidate B gets an extra $70 million (to take them up to the $200 million mark of candidate A) and candidate B just gets their matching $75 million. This would create some interesting strategies. This limit would adjust as the campaign progressed and would have to account for situations where candidate A was ahead of candidate B in raising funds, but then candidate B raised more money. This wouldn't be too difficult, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader. ;)