Campaign Finance Reform? Or Truth-in-Politics

If the goal of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law was to create a better-informed and more meaningful debate about political issues, then it has failed utterly. This is the first Presidential campaign under McCain-Feingold, and it is easily the dirtiest, loudest, and least issue-focused campaign in recent memory. Judging from the sound and fury emanating from the campaigns, the most important issues this year revolve around the Vietnam war. Funny, I thought that war ended 30 years ago.

Just as bad, when the candidates do talk about issues, it tends to be in fuzzy platitudes rather than concrete proposals. Saying that you're going to cut the deficit in half is great, but I'd like to know how each candidate actually proposes to do it. So far, I've been unimpressed.

Even though (unequal distribution of/over-reliance upon) money is a major problem in our system, I'm becoming more and more convinced that campaign finance reform is the wrong way to fix the system. There are two fundamental problems with attacking the money flow: (1) Money is fungible, that is to say, it can flow freely. If you squeeze the money flow in one place, it goes elsewhere (as we are learning with the "527" political organizations this year). (2) You can't restrict how a private individual spends his or her personal money on a political campaign, because that's a violation of the First Amendment. So there will always be the risk of a Bill Gates running for president on his own dime, and blowing the opposition out of the water (financially speaking) with completely unrestricted spending.

But if changing the money flow isn't going to give us more issue-oriented political campaigns, then what will?

I have a few ideas which go after the style of the discourse. In the spirit of our constitutional system, the basic idea is to create checks and balances on political speech, which would moderate the excesses of campaign advertising, and encourage a more grown-up form of discourse.

Modest Proposal #1: A Chain of Accountability

Political speech in general enjoys very strong constitutional protections. Anonymous political speech, however, seems to just ask for trouble. Whether it is candidates running nasty mud-slinging ads without including their own names (as in the pre-McCain-Feingold days) or big partisan donors hiding behind 527s (as is happening today), even a veneer of anonymity seems to create the temptation to say things that one wouldn't dare say under one's own name. We need to make it as simple as possible to connect political ads to the individuals responsible for them.

McCain-Feingold did a lot of good here, but I think we need to do more. For example, groups now take credit for their own ads; and it is possible to find out who the big donors are to campaigns and political organizations. But what we really need is a real-time database, available to all, which would allow anyone with a web browser to look up any political organization, find out who gave the money, and cross-reference those individuals to other political organizations. There should be a very short window for organizations to report their contributions to the database: days at the most. Furthermore, if organization X gives money to organization Y, then all the donors to X will be listed in the database as direct contributors to Y, making it harder to obscure a money trail through multiple layers of political organizations.

The intent is that when you see the ad sponsored by "Left Handed Albanians for The American Way," you should be able to instantly log on and discover who gives money to LHAFTAW, and what other organizations those same people gave money to.

Modest Proposal #2: Guaranteed Rebuttals

Any time a campaign or other political organization buys an advertisement, opposing groups must be given the opportunity to purchase a rebuttal ad. The rebuttal would run immediately after (on TV or radio) or next to (in print or online) the original ad. Media outlets would be required to sell the rebuttal at a rate no higher than the rate for the original ad, and allow rebuttals to be smaller or shorter than the original (if technically possible) at a reduced price. Rebuttals would only apply to paid advertising, so newspapers don't have to rebut their own editorials, for example, or bloggers wouldn't be obligated to allow an opponent to rebut their articles on the same page.

One immediate issue is who qualifies as an "opposing group" and how do you give them the opportunity to rebut. Since we don't want government in the game of deciding how political dividing lines should be drawn, it is best to allow any organization with the money and inclination to buy a rebuttal. Ideally, there would be a central clearinghouse where ads would be posted 48 hours in advance, along with rate information and technical details. Prime-time advertising by major candidates could expect multiple rebuttals, but more obscure ads would likely often go unchallenged. At the end of the day, campaigns would have to decide whether to allocate money to rebuttals of opposing messages or their own ads. The usual rules about accountability and identifying who paid for the ad would apply to rebuttals.

Guaranteeing space for political rebuttals would do two things: first, it would eliminate surprise "gotcha" advertising. Mature political discourse shouldn't depend on catching your opponent off-guard. Second, it would encourage political advertising to focus on substance rather than emotion or wild claims. Arguments based on facts tend to be more immune to rebuttal; and raw emotional appeals would be blunted if immediately followed by an opposing counterclaim.