You Call This Reform?

Jonathan Rauch | April 7, 2001

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Here let me say a word on behalf of reality. The Watergate-era campaign finance laws never worked, from the day they were passed. The astronomical rise in political spending and giving began after those laws were passed in the `70s, not before, and it has continued ever since. Every time someone tries to suppress the flow of money, the money just migrates further underground, and thus further from accountability to voters. If the special interests can't give to politicians, they give to parties; if they can't give to parties, they spend the money themselves. Real "fake reform" is the kind that prolongs the death throes of this unsalvageable system.

Campaign finance law can never work until it accepts the inevitability of private money in politics and settles for channeling that money rather than eliminating it. Encouragingly, the campaign finance bill that passed the Senate this week makes a nod in that direction. A ban on soft money stands the best chance of working if accompanied by an increase in the limits on direct contributions to candidates ("hard money")--thus giving the money somewhere aboveboard and accountable to go. The Senate bill raises hard-money limits nowhere near enough, but it does raise them and index them for inflation, despite The Times' indifference and the hostility of the reactionary partisans of the 1970s system.

So the Senate showed faint signs of coming to grips with reality. One wonders how many more years or decades of failure must pass before The Times, and its fellow "reformers," will do the same.