[Note to visitors from The Corner: If you want to read about who really won the popular vote in 1960, the pertinent post is here. But feel free to browse wherever you like.]
One might assume that the election season just past would have dimmed liberal enthusiasm for the Free Speech Deprivation Act, otherwise known as “McCain-Feingold”. Senator McCain himself complained noisily that the evils he so hated – big money from fat cats, negative advertising, invasion of the politician/media monopoly on political commentary by bloggers and other members of the uninformed public – did not abate. He attributed the lack of results to the wimpiness of the law’s enforcers, but anyone less brimming with paternal pride could reasonably conclude that the whole enterprise was misbegotten.
Still, when a liberal position becomes blatantly indefensible, we can always count on Al Hunt, the Wall Street Journal’s ambassador from the Loony Left, to defend it. In his column today he declares that “McCain-Feingold Did Its Job” [link for on-line Wall Street Journal subscribers only]. The proof: In Al’s telling, the law succeeded because it actually did nothing at all. So what if the 2004 Presidential election was the most expensive in history, or if billionaires infused cash into the race more freely than ever before, or if the rhetorical tone was slightly less elevated than a fishmongers’ convention. None of that mattered. “The purpose of the McCain-Feingold law was not to reduce the amount of money in American politics; it was to reduce the corrupting influence peddling. It worked.”
I recall hearing quite a bit about other purposes when the law was being debated, but let that pass. What about “influence peddling”? I’m pleased to see that Mr. Hunt believes that it has been eliminated and presume that he will not in the future rail about how the Bush Administration is doing the bidding of its financial backers. I’m surprised that he didn’t notice that a money-heavy special interest group, plaintiffs’ lawyers, effectively selected one party’s Vice Presidential nominee. It was obvious last March that John Edwards would add zero to the Democratic ticket, and he abundantly confirmed that expectation during the campaign, failing to carry not just his home state (56 percent for Bush) but also his home precinct (a 70 percent Bush landslide). If John Kerry had been a free agent, he would undoubtedly have chosen someone else, but he wasn’t, because plaintiffs’ lawyers are the financial bulwark of his party and demanded their man in the number two slot. I can’t think of any pre-McCain instance in modern times of monetary influence being deployed so openly and effectively.
So much for what McCain-Feingold supposedly did. What, in Al’s left-eyed vision, didn’t it do?
Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell charged McCain-Feingold meant “the mutual assured destruction of the political parties.”
Instead the Republicans and Democrats flourished, raising more money – well over $1 billion, up about 20% from four years ago, even without soft money – vastly increasing the number of donors, especially small givers, and expanding their support for candidates around the country.
The Republicans had, as it happens, vastly expanded their donor base before McCain-Feingold, and it was clearly in the Democrats’ interest to do the same. Mr. Hunt seems to be suggesting that the party couldn’t recognize its own self-interest without government prodding. Well, that does fit in with his general view that citizens are helpless without Uncle Sam’s benevolent guidance.
With all of its newfound financial strength, however, is the Democratic Party really in better shape than before? One of the most conspicuous features of the campaign was that Senator Kerry didn’t control his own organization or message. A major segment of pro-Kerry (or, more accurately, anti-Bush) advertising came from non-party groups, many of them on the alienated fringe of American politics, and much of the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort fell to the likes of Americans Coming Together, which more or less openly promoted vote fraud. Perhaps the net effect of such support was positive for the Democrats, but for better or worse, the party could do little to influence it. Instead of putting tens of millions of dollars into the hands of the Democratic National Committee, George Soros and his ilk set up their own structures imbued with their own extremism. Official Democrats had little choice but to coordinate as best they could, with the knowledge that many policy options (
That the GOP suffered this loss of control to a much lesser extent was due to the comparatively low level of independent pro-Bush expenditures. One can imagine, though, what might have happened in 1996 if McCain-Feingold had been in force then and Richard Mellon Scaife had decided to play Soros by making huge ad buys on a “Vince Foster Was Murdered” theme. Poor Bob Dole’s respectable loss would have turned into a rout and poisoned the party for years to come. One of the great vices of the new electoral regime is that it removes a safe outlet for men with more dollars and anger than sense, viz., soft money, and encourages them to conduct their own independent campaigns. That development undermines the political parties more than the acquisition of more hundred-dollar donors reinforces them.
More important than the fate of political parties is the future of free political discourse. Here, too, Mr. Hunt sees no problem at all.
The soft money ban, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch flatly insisted, “is an infringement on the rights of free speech.”
Perhaps Sen. Hatch can tell us whose speech was silenced this year? There was no shortage of views and counterviews; no points of view were eliminated by McCain-Feingold. The campaign-reform legislation didn’t outlaw speech. What it did say was that overtly political activities in federal campaigns fell under the federal law.
I suspect that a newspaper columnist would grasp the absurdity of his last couple of sentences if their logic were applied to his employer, but he is right about “no shortage of views and counterviews”. Naturally not, since the law did not stifle either political parties or the media; the target of its restrictions on speech was the ordinary citizen who doesn’t have either a party or a network at his disposal. There, happily, the legal barriers proved ineffective, thanks to the ability of “527 organizations” to speak out freely. But Mr. Hunt does not cheer that parade of “views and counterviews”.
The proliferation of the 527s – named for a section of the Internal Revenue code – was fueled by wealthy donors of both sides: Democrats like billionaire George Soros and Peter Lewis and Republicans like Texans Boone Pickens and Bob Perry. This resulted in this year’s toughest attack: the sleazy anti-Kerry swift boat ads and the anti-Bush Media Fund attacks. [BTW, how do the SBVT ads, consisting largely of eyewitness statements, earn the epithet “sleazy” while Moore-like conspiracy theories are merely “anti-Bush”?]
These groups should have been curtailed; it has nothing to do with free speech. The law for more than a quarter-century has said that if the “major purpose” of any group is to affect the outcome of a federal election, it falls under the campaign-finance law and is subject to a contribution ceiling of $5,000. It’s estimated that 80% of the 527s’ funding was from fat cats who gave $250,000 or more.
The problem is the nefarious [sic] Federal Election Commission was unwilling to enforce this law. If it had, there still would have been a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against John Kerry and a Media Fund against George Bush, but to thrive and grow these groups would have required genuine grass-roots support not the deep pockets of Boone Pickens or George Soros.
Though phrased as an objection to the source of funding of 527’s, the attack is really on their right to speak out at all. If, as Mr. Hunt elsewhere avers, McCain-Feingold took “federal officeholders out of the game; that's where the corruption took place”, it follows that large individual donations to 527’s are not “corrupting influence peddling”. What, then, is wrong with them, except for the fact that they make it possible for groups like the Swifties to get their message out effectively?
What would Al Hunt think of a law that forbade anyone from investing more than $5,000 in a newspaper? Would he accept the argument that it had nothing to do with freedom of the press, since a paper could still be published if it relied on “genuine grass-roots support” rather than “deep pockets”?
McCain-Feingold was not fatal to democracy, because neither regulators nor courts are yet willing to enforce it rigorously. Nonetheless, to the extent that it was applied, it had only detrimental effects: facilitating the entry of extremism into American politics while simultaneously curbing First Amendment rights. Continued advocacy of this system of prior restraint is not rational from anyone’s point of view. Unfortunately, the statute has become a liberal icon. It will, I fear, have to wreak much more damage before the Al Hunts of the world recognize the urgent need for its repeal.
Further reading: As usual, Matthew Hoy’s analysis is worthy of attention.
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