In the Washington Post this morning, E. .Dionne, issues an appeal for the rescue of the Presidential public financing system (E.J. Dionne, Jr., "Reform Worth Rescuing," Washington Post (Aug. 18, 2006) at A21), and this same case is made in an August 16 posting by Fred Wertheimer and Trevor Potter on the Democracy 21 site.  The New York Times adds its own call to arms.  "A Retreat Toward Watergate," New York Times (Aug. 18, 2006). 

     Dionne worries that Congress will neglect to act on proposed reforms, causing the “collapse” of “a system that succeeded in limiting the impact of special-interest money on elections for our highest office.”  Wertheimer and Potter concur that the system “clearly worked” and it will function well again with some repairs, since “the periodic need to fix and strengthen campaign finance laws is an ongoing process, and always has been.  Adjustments and modifications are necessary as times and circumstances change.” 

      It is just this “ongoing process” that gives cause for worry.  Times and circumstances do change, it is true, and sometimes these changes are the occasion to truly reconsider a legislative program and, on the evidence, replace it with something else or do away with it altogether.  But this is not how it works in the reform wars.  A reform once enacted becomes the standard for right-doing.  If there are problems, the fault is often someone’s—say, nasty political operatives and their lawyers, or the incorrigibly irresponsible Federal Election Commission.  Or all that is needed is a bit of maintenance, a tune-up, to get the machinery up and running again.  Supporters of the Presidential system make a habit of referring to the pending proposals as “repairs,” which gets their point across.

      No one taken with these arguments is responding irrationally.  They might well favor public financing of campaigns and not wish to give up on it, and there is no shame on this, for which some perfectly reasonable claims can be made.  One such argument is that for all its faults and problems, public financing is still better than the alternative, or that it spares at least those candidates who choose to participate in the indignities, including the wasted time, suffered in private fundraising.  Some members of the general public might like the program—just the sound of it, if only that—because they aspire to have high-minded Presidential campaigns and we don’t care to have our future Presidents splashing too visibly in the muck of fundraising.  People might well put forward arguments like these.

      The proposition that Dionne, Wertheimer and Potter depend on, however, is more dubious:  that the system has “clearly worked,”, or, in the words of the Times, that it “has served the nation well.”  This seems overstated.  For one thing, we can’t really say that the system “worked” or “served the nation well” when we can’t assert, because we can’t know, what would have happened without this system.  We do know that of all the reforms enacted since the l970’s, the one most stained by controversy was the Presidential public financing reform, which came under attack in the l997 Congressional investigation of the Clinton re-election campaign.  At that time, Mr. Wertheimer was authoring demands for a full criminal investigation of the some of the charges then made.  But he or others will reply that this was no fault of the system, but of operatives and lawyers and the FEC and Janet Reno and career officials of the Department of Justice, and on and on. 

     Another point raised in the system’s favor is that it has encouraged competition, creating candidacies that would have been impossible without it.  Some of the candidacies mentioned from time to time are ones that the country could well have done without:  they were fairly promptly rejected by the public that had innocently paid for them.  Only so much can be said for a program that has been so easily accessible that it has launched the presidential campaigns of individuals without a prayer of success, or even anything much to say or offer,  but who can satisfy an appetite for press coverage and notoriety and the chance to add to the crowding of candidate debates. 

     Of course, some candidates who entered the race with public funds might have succeeded in raising private money.  And where this is unlikely, it is because, unlike Gene McCarthy in l968, these candidates do not have the option under the campaign laws of raising the money freely, up to whatever amounts their most committed supporters and family members can afford.   For them, public funding may well be the only way—the only way around another reform.

     One of biggest problems, unmentioned by any of the three supporters of reform, was that over the period of the system’s triumphs, the public lost interest and the level of taxpayer participation plummeted, putting the system under increasing strain.  To say that the system clearly worked, when the greater part of the public it serves could apparently care less, is to apply a very exclusive test of success.  There is also some other segment of the public that has no use for the idea of public financing, and with many of them in the Republican party, John McCain—once a devotee of the system—has chosen peace with them over public sponsorship of the proposed “repair.”  (The Times  gamely—or naively—suggests that McCain, knowing that he can’t sensibly participate in the broken system, has declined sponsorship in order to avoid hypocrisy.  Only the Times would so readily attribute to McCain the purest motives for what is, in fact, a placatory gesture to the GOP base. )

     To this, the reform interlocutor will reply:  it was not the system’s fault, but that of other problems, easily correctible, such as voters inadequately educated about their own interests or true desires.  One of the proposed reforms is to commit funds to their education, but in this instance, they would not be asked to provide the funds through voluntary check-off but will be schooled with general revenues allocated by legislation for this purpose.  Sponsors of this proposal are not keen on leaving this educational effort to voter choice, since the voter had demonstrated that, when asked about another aspect of participation in this program, namely, the voluntary check-off, her answer didn’t conform to expectation.  Better, then, not to ask.

      All of this may still fail to discourage support for the program on the part of those convinced that, with one or more “repairs,” things would be different.  But this is not just a question of repairs.  Mr. Wertheimer and Mr. Potter make it clear that reform of the Presidential system is, apart from its merits, a necessary if not sufficient condition of expanding public financing to Congressional elections.  Logic and common sense is with them on this point.  If the Presidential system fails, the argument for Congressional public financing goes to pieces.  A repaired Presidential system leaves reformers to fight another day, for adaptation of this program to the Congress.  This is another aspect of the proposal that could give some cause for worry.

Bob Bauer