Campaign Reform: A Way Forward.

Close the loopholes, provide free air time, and fire the consultants

Throughout the impeachment debate this winter, members of Congress kept paying homage to the "sanctity" and the "solemnity" of elections. As an affirmation of constitutional scripture, their words were apt. As an argument against removing a president, they were powerful. But as a portrait of modern politics, they were hooey.

Elections have lost their pride of place at the center of our democratic life. They are bloated with money, stale with ads, devoid of citizens and impervious to change. No one knows this better--or profits from it more--than members of Congress.

Consider the 1998 mid-term elections. They set all sorts of the wrong kind of records, among them:

A record for non-competitiveness. Of the 401 members of the House who sought reelection last fall, a record 98.3 percent won. They outspent their challengers by an average ratio of five to one, and they piled up an average victory margin of 43 percentage points. Nearly a quarter (23.6 percent) did not have any major party opponent on the general election ballot. In the party primaries, only one member of Congress failed to win renomination--Rep. Jay Kim (R-Calif.)--and he was unable to campaign. A judge had confined him to home detention and put him in an ankle bracelet, his penalty for conviction on a charge of accepting an illegal campaign contribution.

A record for non-participation. Some 115.5 million adults, or 64 percent of the eligible electorate, stayed away from the polling booths last Nov. 3. In absolute numbers, this constituted the largest electoral boycott in history. In percentage terms, it was the smallest turnout since 1942, when lots of would-be voters were busy overseas saving the world.

A recorder non-coverage. The major network television news programs carried 73 percent fewer stories about the 1998 midterm elections than they did about the 1994 midterm, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. And in California, ground zero for television's virtual blackout of electoral politics, local stations devoted less than one third of one percent of their news coverage last fall to the open seat governor's race, according to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. "Those who believe that political coverage basically doesn't exist on local TV news turn out to be right," said Annenberg Associate Dean Martin Kaplan.

A record for political advertising volume. The stations did run ads, ads and more ads, however, in California and all over the country. The Television Bureau of Advertising tallied up $531 million in station revenue from political spots in 1998, the biggest election year haul ever. The money paid for thousands of ads that aired a million-plus times. Quickie quiz: Can you remember even one?

A record for campaign spending. Scholars estimate that the aggregate political spending in the 1997-98 election cycle by candidates, parties, and interest groups was about $4 billion, by far the most ever in a non-presidential campaign year. How was the money raised? Brian Baird, a candidate in an open seat race in Washington's 3rd Congressional District, agreed to let a researcher from American University track his campaign day, minute by minute. In September and October, Baird spent an average of four hours a day, seven days a week, in a rented room in Olympia making cold fundraising calls. He spent one hour a day talking to voters. He won.

If all these records were part of the annual report of a business enterprise, the executive summary would read: spending more to attract fewer customers. That business would be staring at bankruptcy or restructuring. Campaigns face no such market discipline. They are more akin to a state-sanctioned monopoly. Consumer boycotts do not faze the monopolists (i.e., the incumbents) who set the rules of the game. They need worry only about market share, not market size. Rising costs do not faze the monopolists. They simply create new campaign finance loopholes through which to extract more contributions from the monied interests eager to stay in their good graces. Best of all, low-turnout, high-cost campaigns raise barriers to entry for non-incumbents, satisfying the monopolist's first rule of self-preservation: eliminate competition before it materializes.

The public understands these dynamics, but registers disapproval by withdrawing from the game rather than by agitating for change--thereby rewarding the monopolists and perpetuating the cycle. This dropout instinct wasn't always so powerful; for much of the 19th Century our presidential election turnout rates hovered around 75 percent. That was the era of the torchlight parade and the party machine. Politics was more raw then, and more corrupt, but also more participatory. What's changed is the way political information is conveyed. Now, citizens learn about candidates from television; then, they learned about candidates from partisan loyalists, neighbors, rallies, the printed word. The older forms gave citizens a sense that they had a stake in the outcome of campaigns. Television gives citizens a sense that politics is merely an entertainment, to be consumed the way the television's talking heads present it--with a smirk and a swagger.

The disconnect between politics and people is especially daunting at the moment--driven from one quarter by "hum of our prosperity" and from another by the din of Monicagate. One has made the public content, the other contemptuous. Both have sent it streaming for the exits from the public square. It may well be that nothing short of a national crisis will reverse the migration. But it may also be that the whole overstuffed, under-populated enterprise of politics is poised to collapse of is own weight--to be replaced by something smarter, cleaner, cheaper, better. Even in the barren landscape of the 1998 election, there were some tantalizing hints that such a day may come sooner rather than later. To hasten it along, what follows are a couple of rules of the road toward political reform. They are offered not as panaceas or guarantees--for none exist--but as hopes and aspirations.

1. Campaign finance reform is but a small piece of a much larger challenge. Don't oversell it, but don't stop pushing for incremental change, for it's within reach.

For two decades, the reform community has taken it as an article of faith that the campaign finance system was one big scandal away from a big fix. The 1996 presidential campaign supplied the scandal--a rash of soft money abuses that drove a gaping loophole through the Watergate-era reform that provides full public funding to presidential candidates who agree to take no private money for their general election campaigns. Right on schedule, the scandals generated weeks of headlines, then months of Congressional hearings, then multiple Justice Department and Federal Election Commission investigations, then ... nothing. There was little outcry from the public and less response from the government. A bill to shut down soft money--the unlimited contributions to political parties by corporations, unions, groups or individuals--did pass the House of Representatives in the summer of 1998, but as expected it ran aground in the Senate, where it remains a stubborn eight votes shy of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Late last year the Justice Department closed down its soft money investigations. Around the same time, the staff of the FEC recommended that the Clinton and Dole campaigns be required to repay millions of dollars in public funds they received in 1996 as a penalty for improperly using party soft money issue ads to promote their candidacies. But the FEC rejected its staff recommendation on a 6-0 vote, essentially agreeing with the Justice Department that these rules were too vague to enforce. These two non-enforcement decisions mean that in the 2000 campaign, soft money will be able to flow unrestrained to support presidential candidates. Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, says that this has thrown the state of campaign finance law backward not just a generation to the Watergate Era but a century to the Robber Baron Era.

The soft money and issue ad loopholes have transformed the way campaigns are waged. Candidates are no longer the sole communicators in their own campaigns. They now share the electoral microphone with a cacophony of other voices--groups, parties, individuals--that run their own campaign ads. The courts are highly protective of the free speech rights of these groups. As long as their ads don't use words such as "vote for" or "vote against," the courts have ruled they are issue ads rather than campaign ads, and therefore not subject to campaign finance regulation. But in reality, most of these issue ads "look more like campaign ads than campaign ads do," says former FEC Chairman Trevor Potter. The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania did a content analysis of the ads that ran in the fall of 1998, and found that issue ads sponsored by parties and groups were twice as likely as candidate ads to attack a political candidate. Annenberg also found that issue ads are the fastest growing form of campaign communication. In the 1996 election, it catalogued some 30 groups that spent an estimated $135 to $150 million on such ads: By 1998, it counted more than 75 groups that had spent up to $330 million. This shift away from candidate-centered campaigns has created "an increasingly unrestrained system that is out of control in terms of accountability," says Brigham Young University political scientist David B. Magleby, who found that in several of the competitive Senate and House races in 1998, aggregate spending by parties and issue groups exceeded aggregate spending by the candidates.

This creates a Catch-22 for campaign finance reformers. The more they try to clamp down on how much candidates can spend, the more they will divert campaign money and message to entities that voters cannot hold accountable on election day. In the past two years, most reformers have faced up to this dilemma and shifted the focus of their legislative energies away from the spending limits approach that had constituted the paradigm for reform for two decades. The leading bipartisan campaign finance measures in the last Congress--McCain-Feingold in the Senate and Shays-Meehan in the House--each started out as spending limits bills, but each had dropped that key provision by the time they went to the floor. Instead, they focus on curbing party soft money and bringing sham issue ads under a regime of disclosure and contribution limits. To win Republican support, such a bipartisan package will probably have to include an increase in the $1,000 per person per election contribution limit to federal candidates--a ceiling that has been lowered by inflation by roughly two-thirds since it was enacted about 25 years ago. These bills will not end the campaign spending arms race or drive special interest money out of politics--goals that are popular but unachievable, given the courts' protection of political spending as political speech. They are more in the nature of a periodic dean-up of the worst abuses in the current system. They are worthwhile, they pass constitutional muster and they stand a good chance of passing Congress. That probably won't happen in the current session, given the distractions of impeachment and presidential politicking. It could well happen after the 2000 election. But if and when it does happen, these campaign finance fixes will not substantially change the dynamics of modern campaigns. They will not open up the system to outsiders. They will not reduce the advantages of incumbency. They will not reconnect people to politics.

2. For more fundamental reform, look to changes in the culture of politics

rather than changes in the laws.

Samuel Goldwyn is said to have quipped after a box office disappointment: "If people don't want to see one of my movies, there's nothing in the world I can do to stop them." The show people don't want to see these days is the show called politics. Who can blame them? It's become a stale production of cookie cutter ads, scripted sound bites and gas bag punditry. But it doesn't have to stay that way. The great anomaly about our current disconnect from politics is that, even as they drift way in boredom, frustration or contempt, people know that politics still matters to all the things they care about--jobs, schools, health care, retirement. And journalists have always known that campaigns can have the ingredients of great theater--suspense, personality, plot line, drama, high stakes, big ending. The trouble is the show. It needs to be reinvented.

The place to start is by going into the belly of the beast--television--and converting it to a medium that allows candidates to talk about issues and tell their story in a way that engages and informs. In other words, to break the grip that attack ads and sound bites have on political discourse. This won't be easy. Most television station managers consider politics to be ratings death. Many candidates (especially incumbents) consider television too important to be left to anything but their 30-second spots. Both are well-served by a status quo that delivers handsome election year profits to broadcasters and lopsided winning percentages to incumbents. They've joined forces over the years to kill all attempts to require that stations provide free air time to candidates and parties. But there's a new proposal on the table that may offer a way around this logjam. A presidential advisory panel known as the Gore Commission issued a report last December that calls on stations to voluntarily provide five minutes a night of "candidate-centered discourse" on the 30 nights preceding all elections.

Five minutes a night might not sound like much, but if each of the nation's 1,600 television stations acted on this recommendation, they could transform campaigns. To start with, they'd force themselves to invent new formats for political discourse that don't cost ratings. Local television has managed to turn the weather report into a heavily-watched five-minute saga every night. Why not the same for politics? How about live mini-debates, in which candidates spar over taxes one night and education the next. Or newsmagazine-style interviews, in which candidates can talk about who they are and where they come from. Or a series of issue statements, in which candidates can present their policy views at more depth than a sound bite. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Create venues where candidates can speak in something other than candidate-speak, because the viewers have already heard all the spin, and it doesn't interest them. If these segments were to become a routine feature of the nightly news, they would be harder for front-running candidates to duck. The model here is the presidential debates. Nobody passed a law to require that candidates take part. It simply became a normal expectation--one that carries political penalties if ignored. If these shorter segments became institutionalized in the same way, it would open up politics to challengers who cannot now compete in campaigns driven exclusively by money and ads. That would mean more choices for citizens and better stories for journalists. And that would reverse the cycle of blowouts, blackouts and boycotts that reached such suffocating dimensions in 1998.

Will the broadcasters step up to the challenge? Seven of the Gore Commission's 22 members were from the industry, and the panel was co-chaired by CBS Television President Leslie Moonves. He promises that CBS will do its part, and some other station groups are likely to do so as well. They find themselves in the uncomfortable position of profiting from a political system that just about everyone considers bankrupt, by running ads that just about everyone considers poisonous. If nothing else, this is bad for television's corporate image and community relations. They also know that their industry's abandonment of political coverage at the state and local level is a journalistic disgrace. On the other hand, the National Association of Broadcasters plays by the never-give-an-inch rules of trade association politics; they can be counted on to fight all standards, even voluntary ones. President Clinton, Vice President Gore and FCC Chairman William Kennard--ardent proponents of free candidate air time--ought to do some heavy jawboning on this issue. American commercial broadcasters are virtually alone in the world in not being required to provide free air time to candidates during election campaigns. The federal government has granted them licenses worth billions of dollars--free of charge--in return for a commitment to serve the public interest. If the broadcasters can't figure out that this modest, voluntary; five-minute fix is in the public interest, somebody needs to tell them.

There are other places to look for fixes. One is the internet. As usage explodes, the internet opens up vast opportunities for political discourse, though the challenge will be to get high quality information not just to those who are motivated to look for it, but to those who aren't. Another is inside the political industry, especially its ad makers. They have become emperors with no clothes, and people have begun to notice. Last June, after businessman Al Checchi reached into his own pockets for a record $40 million and came away with a mere 13 percent of the vote in the California gubernatorial primary, San Francisco ad executive Bob Gardner offered this post-mortem on the race: "The headline should have been: `Political consultants doing crummy, tired, pedestrian, formula ads take down naive billionaire candidate while making enough money to retire to Tahiti.'" The dirty little secret is beginning to get out: political ads don't work nearly as well as they once did. The consultants acknowledge as much--lamenting that in the old days, they could put 500 gross rating points behind an ad to assure it had an impact, while now they need to buy 1,500 or 2,000 points. They blame this on audience fragmentation and the channel clicker. The bigger problem may be their ads. "They are still trying to annoy people into buying their product," says Bill Hillsman, the Minnesota ad man who did Jesse Ventura's campaign commercials. "It's as if they are still running ring-around-the-collar spots from the 1970s. The culture has moved on. The political consultants haven't." Candidates and donors ought to start demanding better value.

Ventura's surprise win in the Minnesota governor's race last year provided another hint that change may be in the air, as did organized labor's old-fashioned get-out-the-vote efforts in Nevada, Wisconsin and other closely contested senate races in 1998. The key to the Ventura victory was that he was included in all six televised debates. He used them to talk about issues in a refreshingly candid way; his two major-party opponents stuck to sound bites and candidate-speak. The key to labor's success was its decision to shift resources from the air war to a ground war. In Nevada, shop stewards visited 40,000 union members in their homes last fall. The labor portion of the electorate nearly doubled from two years before, enabling Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to eke out a razor thin victory. "I think the parties are missing the boat here," says AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal. "Our members tell us they like it when someone comes out to talk to them about politics."

This is hardly radical stuff, but it was just a glimmer in 1998. It seems strange only in a political culture in which campaigning means that a candidate is lashed to a telephone, dialing for dollars to pay for television commercials the public has stopped watching. Talk about strange--that's strange.

PAUL TAYLOR, a former Washington Post reporter, is executive director of The Alliance for Better Campaigns.