In the headline of her latest Fortune column, Easton poses the following puzzler: If campaign finance reform is so important, why hasn?t it worked?
Self-styled reformers will respond, of course, that we haven?t had enough reform. Easton isn?t buying that argument:
Why — after a decade of “reform” — is there more money being spent, more outside electioneering, more negative advertising? Could it be because Washington’s attempt at regulating campaign finance, treated as a sacred cause by editorial pages, has only led to absurd consequences?
Anyone who has been around Washington politics long enough can’t avoid this truism: Election-year money is like a rushing river that invariably finds cracks in any dam the reformers erect. In 2002, Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law to stop the flow of corrupting special-interest money — uncapped donations known as “soft money” — going to political parties.
The result: Special-interest money, from the right and the left, flowed through a widening crack in the dam in the form of tax-exempt 527 and 501(c)4 organizations that took over much of the historical role of the parties, from messaging to getting out the vote. The voices of the national parties, now subjected to the McCain-Feingold limits, and candidates, operating under strict donation caps, are increasingly drowned out.
You?ll want to read the rest of the column to get Easton?s take on the argument that all of these changes have ended up helping Republicans.
Left unexplored in this column is the one certain way to reduce the flow of big money into politics, an option I would endorse wholeheartedly: Make government less important. The less government does for us and to us, the less incentive people will have to spend money influencing those who lead government.
