"Mr. Duncan, the RNC chairman, said the soft-money rules are too broad and prevent the party from participating in state-level races in which no federal politicians are running for office. The rules as written would also prevent the party from directly participating in state redistricting, which will begin following the 2010 census, and from lobbying on state issues."
Didn't the 50-state ground game waged by Mr. Obama and Howard Dean just disprove that thesis? Big donations weren't the key to the Obama electoral college landslide... it was the ground organization that put them over. I'm not saying the man got to the Whitehouse without big donors, but it was the small donors, millions and millions of them making small donations made one at a time, again and again by normal people who put him in Washington atop a wave of populism.
I'm the first to admit that - for better or worse - Barack Obama's fundraising juggernaut changed the face of American politics, especially presidential elections. This still seems like the GOP is fighting the last war rather than learning from the thrashing they just took and applying those lessons in the new arena.
Isn't the Republican party missing the lesson of this election? Do they think that "This Candidate Brought To You By AT&T" is going to trump "This Message Made Possible By 100 Million People Just Like You"?
Or am I the one who is missing something here? What's the angle?
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I think I have to disagree with you on one point here, Scott. The issue the Republicans are going after is not one that affects the presidential election. They are trying to allow the parties to spend soft money on state level elections like state legislatures and city councils. If I understand the issue correctly, Obama's small donor money was not regulated when sent to those kinds of campaigns, while the parties' money has severe limits placed on it.
I think this aspect of the McCain-Feingold legislation is an unintended consequence because it prevents the parties from being able to level the playing field at the local level. While I think limits of some kind at the federal level are appropriate (I am not sure that I agree with the specific McCain-Feingold limits), I think a different set of rules should apply for local elections.
Consider another, unspoken aspect of the spending on this election. Obama raised an unprecedented amount of money through "small donors", a watchword for donors who are difficult to trace and validate. We will likely never know where the money for those donations actually came from, and since there are few laws governing how such money is spent, the Obama campaign was free to spend it pretty much how it liked.
As an example, the Obama campaign is keeping a couple dozen campaign offices open in Georgia and sending paid staffers to help the Democrat candidate in Tuesday's runoff in Georgia (granted, I understand that is a federal election). Somehow, that seems wrong to me, and I think that kind of spending should be watched and regulated in some way just like party spending is now under McCain-Feingold.
I'm not sure I can agree with you there in regard to the national party having virtually limitless funds to dump into local elections. Local elections are where all the "real" governing is done in this country ("All government is local" after all) and I know that in Washington we were so fed up with out of state interest groups meddling in our affairs that we've passed numerous laws and gone all the way to the Supreme Court to defend those laws to keep that sort of thing out in the open.
In the one venue of democracy still left in this country - the local races - do we really want a heavy injection of national money into the process?
I'm not sure that we do.
Speaking of my adopted state: that sort of post-election runoff/recount spending isn't new. When our gubernatorial race became a national farce of recount after recount a few years ago, the Kerry campaign tapped his remaining warchest to help defray the party's early court bills. (Of course, in that case, WA state law required the state to pick up the tab if the person challenging the vote count was right, which turned out to be the case so the money was refunded).
I guess what I am trying to say is that, while the funds raised by the parties and by McCain campaign (because he took public funds) are strictly regulated by McCain-Feingold, the millions Obama raised through private, small donations are not regulated the same way. As a result, the Republican party was prevented from competing at the same level as the Democrat party in many state contests because the Democrats were able to proxy donations through the Obama campaign.
I do not think that tons of soft money targeted at state races is the answer, rather I think any money destined for political campaigns should regulated in the same way so that the money being spent is being spent fairly. Frankly, what I think McCain-Feingold did was make the system dirtier by making it even harder to trace where the money came from and how it is being used.
Frankly, I think we should probably, at this point in our history, have a publicly funded election system that allows people to donate to candidates and parties through a public proxy that keeps careful track of who donates, how much is donated, and how the money is spent. I do not think such an agency should have regulatory control, but that it should be able to make public every dime a campaign gets and how those dimes get spent. Then the people can decide whether they like how the campaigns get money and spend it for themselves.
A lot of those millions and millions of small donations came from the same person donating enough times to turn him into a big donor. His campaign had to deliberately deactivate the security measures on his website's CC donation software, so they knew what they were doing.
That's a good point.
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