Real campaign-finance reform: Ban all paid political advertising in the U.S.

[jonjonz68]

But it won't buy you off with nuttin' -- it's just about impossible for an immigrant or guest-worker to become a Saudi citizen.

I appreciate your point, but I doubt North Korea is opening its doors to non-citizens either.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

What we need to do is make it not merely difficult but impossible for anybody (including the candidates themselves) to affect the outcome of any election by spending money on it. Our only alternatives are that and a de facto plutocracy, which is what we've got now. The 1% have more than enough economic power, without allowing them to wield political power out of proportion to their numbers on top of that.

As is usually the case, the argument for limitations on campaign contributions seems to rear its head most often when early indications point to the very real possibility that Democrats may be outspent in an upcoming election. And as is also usually the case when presented, the crux of the argument is that the number and/or sheer magnitude of the dollar value of corporate contributions give a disproportionate voice within the political arena to a minority of the nation’s wealthiest citizens and thus warrant government constraints on that voice by virtue of its disproportionality alone.

Subplots swirling within the general debate center on whether corporations enjoy (or should enjoy) the First Amendment protections allegedly reserved for individuals under the Constitution as well as whether high dollar contributions present a prima facie case of unethical if not illegal exchange of dollars for the politician’s effort and support on behalf of issues near and dear to the donor’s business model, if not their heart (if, in fact, there exists a meaningful distinction).

Of course, the deliberate association of "individual wealth" with corporate organization is but an obvious weapon of the culture wars. It is true that the business interests of the wealthiest individuals are likely to be legally chartered as a corporation. It is not even close to true that every (or even most) legally incorporated businesses are run by individuals fairly characterized as wealthy, much less audaciously so as some would have us to believe. That would seem worth remembering before we start restricting their rights of political speech.

They don't come much more libertarian than Goldwater, and even he was appalled at this state of affairs.

From the same book, pp. 311-313:

Today's U.S. government is democratic in form but plutocratic in substance. . . . In a misguided 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court held that Congress could not limit spending by rich Americans promoting their own candidacies. This decision was to the equalization of voting power what Dred Scott was to abolitionism. In The Yale Law Review, Jamin Raskin and John Boniface have argued that political candidates in the United States must win a "wealth primary." Candidates without enormous amounts of money, either from their own fortunes or from rich individuals and special interest groups, cannot hope to win the party primaries -- much less general elections. Indeed, the Buckley decision is one reason why more than half the members of the Senate today are millionaires. . . .

It is time to build a wall of separation between check and state. Curing the disease of plutocratic politics requires a correct diagnosis of its cause: the costs of political advertising. The basic problem is that special interests buy access and favors by donating the money needed for expensive political advertising in the media. Elaborate schemes governing the flow of money do nothing to address the central problem: paid political advertising. Instead of devising unworkable limits on campaign financing that leave the basic system intact, we should cut the Gordian knot of campaign corruption by simply outlawing paid political advertising on behalf of any candidate for public office.

N.B.: This relates only to advertising, not editorializing. Media outlets would remain free to editorialize, Fox News and MSNBC would be free to continue politicizing the news each in its own way, etc. The Equal-Time Rule and the Fairness Doctrine are topics for a different debate; in any case, their scope is limited to airwave-broadcast media, not print, cable, or Internet media.

I can’t tell from KO’s presentation whether this last philosophical tidbit is his or Barry Goldwater’s, but let’s consider it in juxtaposition to the problem to be solved. Rather than allowing the public debate to be framed largely from paid advertising in the media, we will simply allow the even smaller percentage of corporate voices – namely those of media corporations to frame the public debate in their editorial pages and public affairs broadcasts as they see fit.

As if the current practices of the corporate media are not sufficiently powerful in creating flattering or more critical candidate images through such editorial coverage, imagine how supreme those images would stand free from any competitive messages through a candidate’s paid media.

And not that such a partisan scheme needs any additional light to reveal its blatant transparency, but if we were to ask which candidates the vast majority of such media corporations traditionally support, is there anyone here who could allege with a poker face that such endorsements are historically evenly split between conservatives and socially liberal candidates?

Secondly, Goldwater is mistaken in his “diagnosis” as to what caused plutocratic politics. Expensive political advertising is not the cause. It is only the symptom. The cause was revealed at some point back in the 1960s when media research discovered that voters would extend their votes to political candidates in a manner similar to how they would respond to emotional appeals on behalf of consumer products.

As Joe McGinniss wrote in his seminal work “The Selling of the President, 1968,” “Voters are basically lazy. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back … Impression can envelop him, invite him in.”

And the harsh reality is that frequent and comparatively brief advertising messages – particularly those conveyed by televised spots – are enormously expensive. Michael Lind’s assertion that “PAC money is driving campaign costs to new heights” is laughably absurd. It is the “new heights” that paid advertising commanded within modern campaign budgets that necessitated the development of a new, creative funding source: the Political Action Committee.

The point is, if the motivation of attempting to chase money out of politics is rooted in the belief that it will force us to return to a more substantive examination of public issues within a political campaign, nothing could be more delusional. A candidate who “stays on message” today, whether that message is a paid advertisement or not, will be trumpeting a message that is as ambiguous as his targeted voter demographics allow. That is simply how a candidate's "big tent" to hold his electoral majority is built these days.

One last opinion on the legalities at issue. In writing for the majority in the case of First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Justice Lewis Powell said:

“The court below framed the principal question in this case as whether and to what extent corporations have First Amendment rights. We believe that the court posed the wrong question. The Constitution often protects interests broader than those of the party seeking their vindication. The First Amendment, in particular, serves significant societal interests. The proper question therefore is not whether corporations "have" First Amendment rights and, if so, whether they are coextensive with those of natural persons. Instead, the question must be whether [the statute] abridges expression that the First Amendment was meant to protect.”

It can hardly be reasonably argued that there is any better example of the speech which the First Amendment sought to protect than that which is common to political debate.

 

[unregistered]

 

[TexasWife25]

^^^^^^^^^^
The damn truth.

The same could be said about the dreaded voter fraud.


However, I don't think it effects the validity of either issue. The Colonel makes some good points, although my gut still says limiting campaign contributions can only be good for our country.

 

[bra_man69]

The same could be said about the dreaded voter fraud.


However, I don't think it effects the validity of either issue. The Colonel makes some good points, although my gut still says limiting campaign contributions can only be good for our country.

Why
What right does the government have to tell anyone on how to spend there money sorry that just happened.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

The same could be said about the dreaded voter fraud.


However, I don't think it effects the validity of either issue. The Colonel makes some good points, although my gut still says limiting campaign contributions can only be good for our country.

Actually, Senator Goldwater, and by extension our colleague KingOrfeo, may have misunderstood the decision in Buckley v. Valeo. That decision held that the Congressional limitations on campaign contributions, were NOT a violation of the contributor's "free speech rights" because the mere changing hands of money was not equivalent to speech.

And yet the Court denied the constitutionality of the limits on a candidate's expenditures because such expenditures were in direct support of the candidates ideas, beliefs and arguments that ran to the very heart of why he should be elected to office.

In the years since, the Court has tended to broaden their definition of politically protected speech, but fwiw, Buckley has not been overruled despite its decreasing value as a legal precedent.

 

[KingOrfeo]

As is usually the case, the argument for limitations on campaign contributions seems to rear its head most often when early indications point to the very real possibility that Democrats may be outspent in an upcoming election.

Obama outspent McCain in 2008, and I didn't like that any better -- not because of which candidate had more to spend, not even because either had more to spend than the other, but because so damned much had to be spent -- Obama's campaign budget was $745 million. Running for public office in America, even the highest office, simply should not be that expensive.