One of the most important lessons of the welfare reform experience is that when a government program is clearly failing, it’s much more effective to propose something new that’s more likely to work than to defend the status quo or mere tweaking at the margins. Since Mark Schmitt’s Democracy Journal article includes the accurate observation that “the obsolete system of partial public financing for presidential campaigns has slowly collapsed,” the question arises: what now then? (By the way, coming from someone who invested so much of his professional energy in campaign finance reform, Mark’s article was about as jarring as Michael Barone’s recent blog entry attacking the Bush administration for corruption. The difference is that Mark, being a good liberal, is adjusting his views based on developments in the real world. It turned out that Barone, being a right-wing ideologue who doesn’t care about reality, was simply victimized by a technological snafu.)

The system for public financing of presidential campaigns, which in its current form dates back to 1974 legislation, is disintegrating for a number of reasons. One is that the percentage of taxpayers volunteering to check-off $3 contributions to the system on their tax returns has fallen from a high of 29 percent in 1980 to just over 10 percent in recent years. While there are a lot of reasons for that drop off, including widespread confusion about what the money is used for, in its own right those figures demonstrate that the public isn’t widely enthusiastic about the program. The other big problems relate to the costs associated with running campaigns, which have outraced the inflation adjustments to the spending limits candidates must abide by to be eligible for support from the public system. Sticking to those levels would put the leading candidates at a disadvantage, so they are opting out. Plus, the whole point of trying to keep candidates from being beholden to big contributors is defeated anyway by the reality that those funders can give in all kinds of other ways that are useful to campaigns – creatively defying the efforts of reformers to plug fingers in the dike.

I think Mark and Yale’s Bruce Ackerman are onto something with a new approach that basically gives up on the quixotic goal of constraining the influence of big contributors by keeping their money out of politics and instead tries to offset their clout by encouraging more average citizens to participate – a trend already underway largely because of the internet. Ackerman’s “Patriot Dollars” proposal – giving vouchers to citizens so they can make a contribution to a campaign or organization of their choice – or a new refundable tax credit tied to contributions, could be funded at least in part by the existing public finance pot and tax checkoff. Lessons from the state and local experiments based on similar ideas could be integrated.

But unless someone has a great idea for fixing the existing public finance system at the federal level (by all means, state-based approaches should continue to be pursued), let’s work on coming up with something new rather than sticking with it because it represents a victory from the past.