NYCivic - If You Want to Play, You Have to Pay

If You Want to Play, You Have to Pay
By Henry J. Stern
October 11, 2002

On this rainy Friday in New York City, I would like to try something new:
An interactive, intelligent and intelligible discussion of an important public issue.

Campaign financing is a subject on which books have been written.   It is not intrinsically interesting to most people. Nor are there easy answers to the legal and political issues it raises. I will try, through simple steps, to venture into the field with a dozen small points.     I know I have just scratched the surface, and I would like you to participate in this effort, just as contributors do in a campaign.

I specifically invite you and your friends, who may know more about this subject than I do, to suggest other points that could be made.   Similar to campaigns, we have word limits. Please keep your thoughts to sixty words per point.   You are also welcome to offer more recent, accurate or incisive versions of the twelve points that I raised, or to refute them.

Send no money, just information, ideas and suggestions. But kindly be succinct, no legal briefs, essays, treatises or law review articles. (Of course, you can send them for reference or cite them.) I want everyone to understand clearly what is being said.

Here we go:

1.    It takes a lot of money to run for public office. Millions are now spent for contested House seats, tens of millions for Senate seats, and hundreds of millions, maybe a billion in 2000, for the Presidency.   The record for local offices is over a hundred million, total spending in the 2001 New York City mayoral campaign.

2.    Hardly anybody has that kind of money and is willing to spend it. A few men, Michael Bloomberg in New York City, Thomas Golisano in New York State, Mike Huffington in the 1994 Senate race in California, and Ross Perot, who ran for President in 1992 and 1996.   Even when these candidates are not elected, Golisano and Perot, their votes may determine which major party candidate wins.

3.    The Supreme Court has ruled that people have constitutional right to spend as much of their own money as they like to run for public office. Nobody has proposed amending the Constitution to overturn that decision.

4.    Candidates who are not very wealthy have to raise funds to compete. The other large source of funds, for incumbents is people who do business with the government. Both the Pataki and McCall campaigns rely heavily on contractors and others whose business requires interaction with the State of New York.

5.    A third source of funds is lobbyists and special interest groups, the tobacco industry, labor unions, real estate owners and managers, public relations people. You name it, people who want something from Albany or Washington.

6.    You can also get money from your friends and relatives, in the amounts permitted by law. These limits apply to all gifts, but the big guys have ways of getting around them. (Multiple organizations, for one.)

7.    Don’t forget idealists, or ideologues, who believe that your cause is just. They have read about you in the newspapers or seen you on TV and like what are you are doing. Or they hate you, as in the millions of dollars in out-of-state money that flowed into the losing effort to defeat Hillary Clinton.

8.    The various campaign committees of the Democratic and Republican parties raise and spend large sums on behalf of local candidates. This is the area in which Senator Torricelli excelled, and a reason why some will miss him.

9.    A variety of measures, including public financing of campaigns in New York City, have attempted to level the playing field, to stimulate debates, to require accurate reporting of campaign contributions. These efforts are commendable and have had a beneficial effect.

10.    There is still a great problem in dealing with personal wealth, and the advantage of incumbency and its access to business and labor.

11.    Somehow, Bloomberg and Golisano’s wealth is not as objectionable as others’ money because they earned it, rather than inherited it or married it.   Although there is clearly no legal basis for any distinction based on the source of wealth, it makes one feel somewhat better if the person is spending his children’s inheritance and not his own.

12.    The passage of the McCain-Feingold bill by Congress and President Bush having to sign it is a great symbolic victory, and if it actually has a significant effect on campaign spending and fund raising, so much to the good. But the Devil often has the better lawyers, perhaps because he needs them more.