Justifying McCain-Feingold

This weekend is the deadline for presidential committees and exploratory committees to post their FEC filings to the Commission's website, which means that on Monday, hundreds of reporters and a few dozen amatuer campaign finance geeks like me, will be analyzing the reports for their contents and hints at the power behind the money. But will all that going on, there has been a pretty interesting debate among some campaign finance luminaries from both the reform and the anti-regulatory crowd. Brad Smith has a excellent commentary on the debate, as well as links to the major players.

First, it is important to remember that McCain-Feingold was sold to the public - including many members of Congress - a bit like a 19th century patent medicine: "It's good for what ails ya'." The record is rife with comments that it will reduce negative campaigns; it will reduce corruption; it will get spending on campaigns under control. Think campaigns are too long? Support McCain-Feingold! Too much special interest influence? Support McCain-Feingold! Tired of political ads? Support McCain-Feingold! This is not really something that supporters of the bill can deny...

campaign finance reform is largely based on faith - the faith that money corrupts politicians, despite, for example, a woeful inability of political studies to find such corruption; or the argument that public funding will solve the problem, despite the failure of it to do so where it has been tried. Reformers have long had a tendency to resort to a type of intellectual bullying when their arguments start to go down, including aggressive attacks on the integrity of their opponents. But this type of posturing is wearing thin, and the effort to defend McCain-Feingold - an effort that, as Bauer notes, few will say and fewer still believe - will take a few more layers off the reformers' credibility: The era of McCain-Feingold is the era of Jack Abramoff and Bob Ney; the era of "stand by your ad" is the era of MoveOn; and so it goes.

One can certainly still argue that campaign finance reform - whatever that means, since the meaning of reform seems to change regularly, the only constant being that deregulation is not "reform" - is a good idea. There are reasonable arguements for that proposition. But arguing that McCain-Feingold is proof that that theory is correct is probably not a smart place to start.

I have been following the debate as well and my comments are nearly as deep as Brad's. To me the whole argument surrounding McCain-Feingold was about making a supposedly unfair playing field a little more level (see the Senate record about the Millionaire's Amendment--a piece of incumbent protection junk if there ever was one) or about reducing the influence of money in politics.

The problem is that politics is about money. Not just electoral politics, but policy politics as well. Lobbying is most intense when dealing with appropriations and authorizations for the expenditure of money. If interest groups are willing to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on lobbying, it is really reasonable to expect that they won't also raise money to help favored candidates win re-election?

McCain-Feingold became law at a time when partisan politics moved beyond the rough-and-tumble it could have been charitably called in the late 20th Centry to the all out blood fued of the early 21st. After the Bush v. Gore debacle and 2000 election, it was all but a given that partisans on both sides of the aisle were going to take fundraising seriously and the efforts and results show that intensity to win. While the amount of money a candidate spends is not the only determinant of who will win the election, the correlation is awfully strong.

McCain-Feingold is not the worst thing that could have happened, but the shift in the debate over its justifications seems to indicate that the law is no longer viewed, even by one of its namesakes, as a necessarily goog thing.