When I first started working for Greenpeace, in 1989, I used to attend a weekly strategy session on campaign finance reform, hosted by Common Cause. I was working on issues relating to toxic pollution at the time, but everyone working in the public interest realized that if we could just get big money out of politics, we’d have a better shot at a truly representative democracy. Besides, Common Cause threw in a free lunch, no small inducement in those lean days.
So we petitioned and we rallied and we lobbied and we gathered signatures, trying to get someone, anyone in Congress or the media to pay attention to campaign finance reform. Today, we have at least accomplished that much. You can’t open a newspaper these days without smudging your fingers with ink from a story on campaign finance reform. And yet, for all the editorial commotion, I fear we are no closer to real reform than we were in the days of the free lunch.
Why this should be is made clear by a quick trudge through our system of government. For the purpose of our discussion, let us say that government is the collective will of the people, often expressed in the guise of money, collected as taxes and spent for items of common welfare like roads and bridges, schools and libraries and Air Force One.
Since we all cannot be involved in the discussions that lead to these expenditures, we elect representatives and delegate authority to them. They are charged with the task of wise taxing and efficient spending. There are other duties, but for the most part, the job is all about money.
People who are, or want to be, elected representatives understand this. During campaigns for public office, much of the debate is precisely about which candidate will be the more prudent guardian of the public purse. In the last 20 years, this topic has pushed nearly all others to the side.
However, in those same last 20 years, television commercials have become the great campaign medium and arena for political debate. Commercial television time is expensive and in those self-same 20 years, the key ingredient for political success has been the amount of money a candidate can raise and spend buying commercial television time to tell voters he or she is very careful about spending money.
This seems to be the great crippling paradox of modern democracy. The people we send to city hall or the state capital or Washington, DC to be frugal and judicious guardians of our public funds have qualified themselves for the task by spending dollars – theirs and other people’s – by huge and reckless millions for the period immediately preceding the election.
My suggestion for reform – the Election Efficiency Act – is to award electoral victory not to the candidate with the most votes, but to the candidate who gets the most votes per dollar spent. This, I think, would provide a truer test of who is better fit to govern, who can wring the most benefit from each penny. Candidates can continue to spend as much as they like, they just have to spend wisely. Perhaps, in time, this would lead to a competition among candidates to see who could spend the least. Now that’s something I’d like to see.
The Inverse Law of Electoral Politics
When I first started working for Greenpeace, in 1989, I used to attend a weekly strategy session on campaign finance reform, hosted by Common Cause. I was working on issues relating to toxic pollution at the time, but everyone working in the public interest realized that if we could just get big money out of politics, we’d have a better shot at a truly representative democracy. Besides, Common Cause threw in a free lunch, no small inducement in those lean days.
So we petitioned and we rallied and we lobbied and we gathered signatures, trying to get someone, anyone in Congress or the media to pay attention to campaign finance reform. Today, we have at least accomplished that much. You can’t open a newspaper these days without smudging your fingers with ink from a story on campaign finance reform. And yet, for all the editorial commotion, I fear we are no closer to real reform than we were in the days of the free lunch.
Why this should be is made clear by a quick trudge through our system of government. For the purpose of our discussion, let us say that government is the collective will of the people, often expressed in the guise of money, collected as taxes and spent for items of common welfare like roads and bridges, schools and libraries and Air Force One.
Since we all cannot be involved in the discussions that lead to these expenditures, we elect representatives and delegate authority to them. They are charged with the task of wise taxing and efficient spending. There are other duties, but for the most part, the job is all about money.
People who are, or want to be, elected representatives understand this. During campaigns for public office, much of the debate is precisely about which candidate will be the more prudent guardian of the public purse. In the last 20 years, this topic has pushed nearly all others to the side.
However, in those same last 20 years, television commercials have become the great campaign medium and arena for political debate. Commercial television time is expensive and in those self-same 20 years, the key ingredient for political success has been the amount of money a candidate can raise and spend buying commercial television time to tell voters he or she is very careful about spending money.
This seems to be the great crippling paradox of modern democracy. The people we send to city hall or the state capital or Washington, DC to be frugal and judicious guardians of our public funds have qualified themselves for the task by spending dollars – theirs and other people’s – by huge and reckless millions for the period immediately preceding the election.
My suggestion for reform – the Election Efficiency Act – is to award electoral victory not to the candidate with the most votes, but to the candidate who gets the most votes per dollar spent. This, I think, would provide a truer test of who is better fit to govern, who can wring the most benefit from each penny. Candidates can continue to spend as much as they like, they just have to spend wisely. Perhaps, in time, this would lead to a competition among candidates to see who could spend the least. Now that’s something I’d like to see.
(c) Mark Floegel, 1998