Norm Ornstein and Anthony Corrado have said, again, what few others will, and what still fewer others believe.  They argue that McCain Feingold has worked, well and faster than anyone would have imagined.  The structure and timing of their argument works in the end against them.  As much as they conclude by saying that they wish to drink a vintage wine in celebration of their achievement, they might be more tempted to drink through their doubts.

     Their piece, in the Washington Post, appeared on the morning of the first few Presidential fundraising announcements, so far made only by candidates who have opted out of the Presidential public funding system.  "Reform that Has Really Paid Off," Washington Post (Apr. 1, 2007) at B3.  Each boasts about the monies raised; each chose public funding, in part because McCain Feingold left them no other choice.  The law raised the contribution limits for all manner of donations except those that can be matched with public funds for Presidential primary aspirants.  The sponsors of McCain  Feingold were intent on restricting resources, not liberalizing its availability; as a police measure, it succeeded in assuring the end of the primary public funding system, already in its twilight phase.

     This was not merely an accident, an oversight by the sponsors.  The late Senator Paul Wellstone offered another liberalizing option that, by providing relief from federal pre-emption limitations, would have encouraged state experimentation with public financing in Congressional elections.  Incumbents who voted against this measure, including McCain and Feingold, were worried about the appearance, or the charge, that politicians were providing themselves with “welfare.”

     In a sense some might still have said this, since the law on the floor was fixed up with advantages of particular appeal and value to the incumbents who approved them.  Contribution limits were raised and indexed for inflation; additional relief from limits was provided for candidates who faced millionaires.  Ornstein and Corrado manage to ignore these measures while heralding their fruits:  the additional “hard money” that parties and candidates have raised since the law was passed. 

     So the authors try to slip past the reader the proposition that “In the two elections since [the enactment of BCRA], the parties raised exactly the same amount, but all in "hard money," meaning smaller contributions from individuals and PACs.”  Yes, hard money contributions in the regulated system are not unlimited in amount, but these smaller contributions now reach, for party donors, $28,500 to a national party committee and for the two year cycle, $108,200 to all parties, PACs and candidates.  Ornstein and Corrado would treat as a “smaller contribution” from a couple, giving the maximum, almost a quarter of a million dollars donated to their favored candidates and parties over an election cycle.

     Corrado and Ornstein wish to emphasize how many truly “small contributions,” given in amounts less than $200, have been included in the parties’ yield.  Their mistake is the usual one of ignoring trends in progress at the time the law was passed.  Various ways of raising money more efficiently, including from larger numbers of donors giving in smaller amounts, were being actively explored for years—beginning with the great excitement over direct mail in the l980s and continuing to this day in the creative uses of the Internet.  McCain-Feingold encouraged this effort, but its singular effect is unknowable and, accordingly, overstated by Ornstein and Corrado.  It is the same avoidance of the question, “compared to what?” that enables these defenders of their own effort to speak of how much the parties raised under their law, when the parties plainly would have raised a great deal—indeed a lot more—without it, in both hard and soft money.

     Theirs is a strange defense, in which they are anxious to show how much money various actors have been able to raise and spend in the wake of their law’s passage.  The case they make is surprisingly and cold-bloodedly quantitative.  A bill to control money in politics is presented as not-so-bad-after-all because a great deal of money contributes to be raised, but more in the way favored by these well-seasoned observers.

     But what lies behind the numbers?  Is politics cleaner, less cursed by the money chase?  Do candidates spend less time worrying about or raising it—and does the political press, in handicapping races, put less stock in how well they do so?  Does the public seem satisfied that it is getting better government from a Congress now purified of the ill effects of private funding?  And how much contention and confusion, and the resources needed to sort through them, has followed the law through the agencies and the courts as this law in all its complexity continues to defy conventional understanding?  And what of the balance of benefit and cost when some of the direct limitations on speech and association are also brought into the analysis?

     If Norm Ornstein and Tony Corrado wish to argue that the law has influenced money in politics, they cannot, as they know, be entirely wrong.  It is a law, after all:  it raised the contribution limits, banned certain ads from the airwaves, required candidates to publicly “stand by” their own ads.  It compels certain behaviors and prohibits others.  But this defense cannot tell us what it accomplished, except that ever larger sums continue to be spent, for some years now a fact of political life.

     This being all they can really say, they are prepared to drink to it.