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Welcome.
With retirement comes reflection. Stepping forward today in favor of campaign finance reform are Pamela Finmark and William Chalmers. Now that their political consulting and "donut" fundraising days now firmly behind them, they write in the Los Angeles Times that
"...the great Internet myth circulating today says...that online donors are democratizing the campaign finance system. They aren't. They are just putting a little more money into the system. The major donors are still the key to candidate survival....
"So what can we do? The best solution we have heard of is called the "patriot dollars" plan, put forth by Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres. Basically, it eliminates all hard contributions to candidates. Period. Instead, each voter is given a $50 ATM card so that he or she can literally vote with their dollars and contribute their $50, in part or in whole, to their choice of federal candidates. Simple enough. Let's do the math. We spend about $5 billion to $6 billion collectively on all federal elections. If the approximately 131 million who voted in November also had voted with $50 worth of patriot bucks, the donations would have equaled -- surprise -- $6.5 billion! That money would cover presidential, Senate and congressional races."
From the Pew Internet and American Life Project: [As of June 15, 2008,] "At this point in the campaign, 8% of internet users (representing 6% of all adults) have donated money to a candidate online. This is a notable increase from the 3% of internet users (representing 2% of all adults) who had donated money online the first time we asked this question in our fall 2006 survey."
Update: The Obama campaign's success came on all fronts, not just from small donors, per this debunking report from Michael Malbin of the Campaign Finance Institute.
"Although an unusually high percentage (49%) of Obama's funds came in discrete contributions of $200 or less , only 26% of his money through August 31 (and 24% of his funds through October 15, according to the most recent FEC reports) came from donors whose total contributions aggregated to $200 or less. Obama's 26% compares to 25% for George W. Bush in 2004, 20% for John Kerry in 2004, 21% for John McCain in 2008, 13% for Hillary Clinton in 2008, and 38% for Howard Dean in 2004.... The fact is that Obama's financial juggernaut broke records at all contribution levels. The reality does not match the myth, but the reality itself was impressive."
Not to be left out of the discussion is Bob Bauer, counsel to the Obama campaign and the leading election law attorney for the Democratic Party. He argues that CFI's parsing of small donor categories is skewed to favor its vision for reform. "Even if one curiously believes that every donation above $200 is a large donation, or that someone giving repeatedly in small amounts totaling more than $200 in the aggregate is a large donor, the fact remains that Obama could not have raised the funds he did without this unprecedented pool of voters donating in the aggregate less than $1,000 (the maximum allowable donation per election is $2300). And in the category of contributions of $1,000 or more—the category of donors that CFI describes as "large"—Obama’s total by CFI’s calculation was merely 33% of the whole, to be compared to McCain’s 53% or Kerry’s 44% or Bush’s 57%."
-- Bill Corbett
Over 130 million voters cast ballots on November 4. The turnout of the voting-eligible population reached 61%, its highest since 1968, when the military draft touched lives in every community. This year's democratic resurgence holds modest promise for involving more people, more of the time, in political life.
In an interview on the election, Jim Fishkin explained on Radio OpenSource how successful innovations in voter mobilization evidence the capacity for innovation in voter deliberation.
One possible, immediate step in this direction is the well-framed proposal of a number of leaders in the field of deliberative democracy for a White House Office on Civic Engagement.
The election drove home, as well, the reality that the financing political campaigns will continue to change, perhaps in unexpected ways. A Gallup poll on popular attitudes towards public financing of the presidential campaigns revealed a reversal of partisans' usual views. Newfound support for taxpayer-funded elections among Republicans, as well as surprising opposition among Democrats, reflected shifting views of partisan advantage, and belied attachment to any organizing principle for campaign finance.
As Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres have written in the American Prospect, Barack Obama's success shows that ordinary Americans want a system that places them at the very center of campaign finance.
Small donor democracy did not displace fat-cat fundraising in 2008, on either side. But as the head of the leading business lobby for campaign finance reform, Charles Kolb, said after Election Day, In a joint statement with the campaign finance reform advocate Fred Wertheimber, "Small donations raised on the Internet and magnified by public matching funds can and should be the wave of the future for presidential campaigns and ultimately for all of our elections."
Bill Corbett
The New York Times and Slate report on the possibility that the Supreme Court of the United States will accept any or all of three cases from West Virginia that involve millions of dollars of campaign donations to state supreme court justices from litigants.
Slate argues for public financing of judicial elections, accompanied by tougher requirements that judges recuse themselves from cases that involve their contributors.
I suggest a different approach: make justice blind, by making campaign contributions anonymous in state judicial elections.
If the Supreme Court accepts some of the WWWV campaign finance cases, the outcomes range in two directions. One is a pro-reform direction, such as an outcome that sets a standard for campaign contributions that impermissibly infringe on the Constitution's due process guarantee. A pro-reform outcome might improve the worsening situation in the thirty-nine states that elect some or all of their judges.
The other, more likely direction is anti-reform, such as an outcome that strikes down the Court's precedents which establish that the potential for the appearance of corruption is a constitutionally valid basis for campaign finance regulation. West Virginia could become even more wild and wonderful, if the Court's conservative majority continues to back away from earlier decisions in favor of campaign finance regulation.
The anti-reform outcome might be the better one for popular involvement in American politics. By bringing attention to conservative doctrine that equates the uses of wealth in political campaigns with free speech, the activist justices would get more Americans talking.
Update: The Supreme Court of the United States will hear the case. An amici (friends of the court) brief by reform advocates alleges not an appearance of corruption, but a violation of due process.
-- Bill Corbett
Lost in the noise of the presidential campaign is some good news: The demise of the public financing system for presidential elections, which was devised after Watergate, and the rise of small donor democracy via the Internet. Senator Obama's fundraising victory over Senator McCain renews the forty-year old effort to directly involve the public in the financing of presidential campaigns.
From Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff comes an idea for another innovation that financially rewards candidates who generate greatest popular interest, the public financing of presidential campaigns through a share of television advertising proceeds during the national political conventions.
Tapping public control of the airwaves to promote public attention to political speech is not a new idea. The innovation of Ayres and Nalebuff is to focus their proposal on two of the moments in American political life when the most Americans are paying attention.
A positive dynamic between popular attention to poltics and popular financing for politics is a new and praiseworthy attribute of the Internet. Ayres and Nalebuff are on the right track in trying to find a way to bring that dynamic to television.
-- Bill Crobett
News from PopCity in Pittsburgh:
