Sometimes we are our own worst enemy, especially in campaign finance reform...

[kentuck]

There was a time, not long ago, that Republicans consistently raised more money than the Democrats. Year in and year out, the Republicans would outraise our Party by almost 2 to 1. However, the Internet and the campaign of Howard Dean most specifically changed that. Democrats noticed that they had a way to raise large amounts of money, more than enough to compete with the big-money Republicans.

However, when that happened, many in the Party decided we no longer needed campaign finance reform, especially not public financing. In the last couple of weeks, we have had the Clinton and Edwards campaigns declare that they would forego public financing. Our success has become our failure, it appears?

[flpoljunkie]

1. Dems have a chance to pass public financing--put the public interest before the special interests,

who bankroll their campaigns. The question is, will they do it. Steny "K Street" Hoyer made it quite clear yesterday on Meet The Press that he liked things just fine the way they are.

Congress likes things the way they are because they do not want a level playing field. They depend on lobbyists to fill their campaign coffers and scare off any serious competition--unless the competition is independently weatlhy, i.e, Ned Lamont.

Kerry's Clean Money, Clean Elections Act of 1997 provided for free and reduced tv time for candidates. This is what costs candidates so much and keeps them dependent on lobbyists' bankrolling their campaigns.

It is nothing more than "legalized bribery" and we must force our party to step up to the plate and work to end it now!

Show us some leg, Dems--pass public financing of campaigns--and we will work our hearts out for you! Let Bush veto it--if the Republicans don't block it in the Senate!

[flpoljunkie]

2. Read Sen. Durbin's speech on public financing, and why he feels the time has come to fix the system

But there is something built into our political system that really has to be debated, that goes to the real heart of this issue; that is, the way we finance our campaigns as elected officials.

Unless you are one of the fortunate few--so wealthy that you can finance your own campaign and never ask for a contribution--most of us spend a good part of our public lives asking for donations. We go to every one we see, from those of modest means who give us small checks to the richest people in America who write much larger checks. It is almost an imperative if you are not wealthy, if you want to finance a campaign, to find millions of dollars to buy the television and radio time to deliver your message in your State. If we really want to get to the heart of restoring the confidence of the American people in our Government, we have to go to the heart of the problem--the way we finance political campaigns.

For many years on Capitol Hill, I resisted the notion of public financing of campaigns. I had some pretty good arguments against it. Why do I want to see public moneys or taxpayer dollars going to crazy candidates representing outlandish causes who have no business in this political process? Well, those arguments held up for a while, but over time I came to understand that while I was arguing against that lunatic fringe in American politics, I was creating a trap for everyone else who was honest and trying to raise enough money to wage an effective campaign.

The time has come for real change. In this last election cycle, which the Presiding Officer knows full well, more money was spent in that off-year election than in the previous Presidential election year. The amount of money going into our political process is growing geometrically. It means that more and more special interest groups and individuals with an agenda are pouring dollars into the political process. It means that our poor, unsuspecting voters are the victims of these driveby ads that come at them night and day for months before a campaign. It means that candidates, both incumbents and challengers, spend month after weary month on the telephone begging for money.

It is no surprise that the same people we are begging money for are the people who are the subject of this ethics legislation--the lobbyists of the special interest groups. We live in this parallel world.

Today, with the passage of this underlying legislation, we will ban a lobbyist buying me lunch. Tomorrow that same lobbyist can have me over for lunch at his lobbying firm to provide campaign funds for my reelection campaign, and it is perfectly legal. What is the difference? From the viewpoint of the person standing on the street looking through the window, there is none. It is the same lobbyist and the same Member of Congress. The fact that one is a political campaign fundraising event and another is a personal lunch is a distinction which will be lost on most of America.

The reason I raise this is I will support these ethics reforms. They are absolutely essential. They are the product of the scandals we have seen on Capitol Hill in the last several years. But if we stop there, if we do nothing about the financing of our political campaigns, we have still left a trap out there for honest people serving in Congress to fall into as they try to raise money for their political campaigns. In a few weeks I will be introducing public financing legislation to try to move us to a place where some States have already gone--the States of Arizona, for example, and Maine--moving toward clean campaigns, understanding that the voters are so hungry for changes and reforms that will shorten campaigns, make them more substantive, take the special interest money out of those campaigns, make them a real forum and debate of ideas and not a contest of fundraising. Sadly, that is what they have become in many instances.

I urge my colleagues in their zeal for reform not to believe that the passage of S. 1 and its amendments will be the end of the debate. I hope it will only be the beginning and that we can move, even in this session of Congress, to meaningful hearings and the passage of public financing of campaigns that will truly reform the way we elect men and women to office at the Federal level and restore respect to this great institution of the U.S. Congress, both the House and the Senate.

http://www.publicampaign.org/blog/2007/01/11/sen-durbins-speech-in-support-of-public-financing

[karynnj]

3. The Maine and Arizonia rules Durbin mentioned are based on Kerry's

Clean Election bill. The problem is that there is bipartisan lack of support for real campaign fiance reform. (Consider that on ethics reform (a sister issue), Reid and most Democrats wanted the weakest bill possible so they could point to it and and claim to have fixed the ethics problem.

In 2008, I understand that given the awful McCain/Feingold rules, that all the Democrats will opt out - not doing so guarrantees an uneven playing field. That legislation likely hurtgenuine reform - as it had so many loopholes and the awful provision that disadvantages the party out of power (with the earlier convention).

But, in opting out, I would love to hear a candidate say he was for it in spirit and if elected he would fight for real reform. When Kerry and Wellstone re-introduced the Clean election bill in 1997, Kerry pointed out that incumbents benefited by the existing rules, but he made an excellent case that it was our democracy that was at stake.

Kerry's comments:
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I want to speak before you today about a critical challenge before this Senate--the challenge of reforming the way in which elections are conducted in the United States; the challenge of ending the ``moneyocracy'' that has turned our elections into auctions where public office is sold to the highest bidder. I want to implore the Congress to take meaningful steps this year to ban soft money, strengthen the Federal Election Commission, provide candidates the opportunity to pay for their campaigns with clean money, end the growing trend of dangerous sham issue ads, and meet the ultimate goal of restoring the rights of average Americans to have a stake in their democracy. Today I am proud to join with my colleague from Minnesota, PAUL WELLSTONE, to introduce the ``Clean Money'' bill which I believe will help all of us entrusted to shape public policy to arrive at a point where we can truly say we are rebuilding Americans' faith in our democracy.
For the last 10 years, I have stood before you to push for comprehensive campaign reform. We have made nips and tucks at the edges of the system, but we have always found excuses to hold us back from making the system work. It's long past time that we act--in a comprehensive way--to curtail the way in which soft money and the big special interest dollars are crowding ordinary citizens out of this political system.
Today the political system is being corrupted because there is too much unregulated, misused money circulating in an environment where candidates will do anything to get elected and where, too often, the special interests set the tone of debate more than the political leaders or the American people. Just consider the facts for a moment. The rising cost of seeking political office is outrageous. In 1996, House and Senate candidates spent more than $765 million, a 76% increase since 1990 and a six fold increase since 1976. Since 1976, the average cost for a winning Senate race went from $600,000 to $3.3 million, and in the arms race for campaign dollars in 1996 many of us were forced to spend significantly more than that. In constant dollars, we have seen an increase of over 100 percent in the money spent for Senatorial races from 1980 to 1994. Today Senators often spend more time on the phone ``dialing for dollars'' than on the Senate floor. The average Senator must raise $12,000 a week for six years to pay for his or her re-election campaign.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The use of soft money has exploded. In 1988, Democrats and Republicans raised a combined $45 million in soft money. In 1992 that number doubled to reach $90 million and in 1995-96 that number tripled to $262 million. This trend continues in this cycle. What's the impact of all that soft money? It means that the special interests are being heard. They're the ones with the influence. But ordinary citizens can't compete. Fewer than one third of one percent of eligible voters donated more than $250 in the electoral cycle of 1996. They're on the sidelines in what is becoming a coin-operated political system.
The American people want us to act today to forge a better system. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 77% of the public believes that campaign finance reform is needed ``because there is too much money being spent on political campaigns, which leads to excessive influence by special interests and wealthy individuals at the expense of average people.'' Last spring a New York Times found that an astonishing 91% of the public favor a fundamental transformation of this system.
Cynics say that the American people don't care about campaign finance. It's not true. Citizens just don't believe we'll have the courage to act--they're fed up with our defense of the status quo. They're disturbed by our fear of moving away from this status quo which is destroying our democracy. Soft money, political experts tell us, is good for incumbents, good for those of us within the system already. Well, nothing can be good for any elected official that hurts our democracy, that drives citizens out of the process, and which keeps politicians glued to the phone raising money when they ought to be doing the people's business. Let's put aside the status quo, and let's act today to restore our democracy, to make it once more all that the founders promised it could be.
Let us pass the Clean Mo ney Bill to restore faith in our government in this age when it has been so badly eroded.
Let us recognize that the faith in government and in our political process which leads Americans to go to town hall meetings, or to attend local caucuses, or even to vote--that faith which makes political expression worthwhile for ordinary working Americans--is being threatened by a political system that appears to reward the special interests that can play the game and the politicians who can game the system.
Each time we have debated campaign finance reform in this Senate, too many of our colleagues have safeguarded the status quo under the guise of protecting the political speech of the Fortune 500. But today we must pass campaign finance reform to protect the political voice of the 250 million ordinary, working Americans without a fortune. It is their dwindling faith in our political system that must be restored.
Twenty five years ago, I sat before the Foreign Relations Committee, a young veteran having returned from Vietnam. Behind me sat hundreds of veterans committed to ending the war the Vietnam War. Even then we questioned whether ordinary Americans, battle scarred veterans, could have a voice in a political system where the costs of campaigns, the price of elected office seemed prohibitive. Young men who had put their life on the front lines for their country were worried that the wall of special interests between the people and their government might have been too thick even then for our voices to be heard in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.
But we had a reserve of faith left, some belief in the promise and the influence of political expression for all Americans. That sliver of faith saved lives. Ordinary citizens stopped a war that had taken 59,000 American lives.
GPO's PDF
Every time in the history of this republic when we have faced a moral challenge, there has been enough faith in our democracy to stir the passions of ordinary Americans to act--to write to their Members of Congress; to come to Washington and speak with us one on one; to walk door to door on behalf of issues and candidates; and to vote on election day for people they believe will fight for them in Washington.
It's the activism of citizens in our democracy that has made the American experiment a success. Ordinary citizens--at the most critical moments in our history--were filled with a sense of efficacy. They believed they had influence in their government.
Today those same citizens are turning away from our political system. They believe the only kind of influence left in American politics is the kind you wield with a checkbook. The senior citizen living on a social security check knows her influence is inconsequential compared to the interest group that can saturate a media market with a million dollars in ads that play fast and loose with the facts. The mother struggling to find decent health care for her children knows her influence is trivial compared to the special interests on K Street that can deliver contributions to incumbent politicians struggling to stay in office.
But I would remind you that whenever our country faces a challenge, it is not the special interests, but rather the average citizen, who holds the responsibility to protect our nation. The next time our nation faces a crisis and the people's voice needs to be heard to turn the tide of history, will the average American believe enough in the process to give words to the feelings beyond the beltway, the currents of public opinion that run beneath the surface of our political dialogue?
In times of real challenge for our country in the years to come, will the young people speak up once again? Not if we continue to hand over control of our political system to the special interests who can infuse the system with soft money and with phony television ads that make a mockery of the issues.
The children of the generation that fought to lower the voting age to 18 are abandoning the voting booth themselves. Polls reveal they believe it is more likely that they'll be abducted by aliens than it is that their vote will make a real difference. For America's young people the MTV Voter Participation Challenge ``Choose or Lose'' has become a cynical joke. In their minds, the choice has already been lost--lost to the special interests. That is a loss this Senate should take very seriously. That is tremendous damage done to our democracy, damage we have a responsibility in this Senate to repair. Mr. President, with this legislation we are introducing today, we can begin that effort--we can repair and revitalize our political process, and we can guarantee ``clean el ections'' fu nded by ``clean mo ney,'' elections wh ere our citizens are the ones who make the difference

[flpoljunkie]

4. Thanks for this post, karynnj. Kerry is dead on. It is our democracy that is at stake!

I will wholeheartedly support a 2008 Dem candidate who commits to real campaign reform--that is, public financing of campaigns.