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typical complaint of campaign-finance reformers is that politics
is too negative and dishonest.
One might expect
therefore that advocates of reform would feel some obligation not
to be so negative in the way they depict politicians, or at the
very least to be truthful when they do decide to "go negative"
against political opponents.
Alas, no one
has done more to create an "appearance" of corruption
in politics than campaign-finance reformers who ignore or distort
facts to make reckless charges of corruption.
Consider The
American Prospect, which has a heavy-breathing editorial in
its most recent issue decrying how corporations have supposedly
stolen away our democracy.
"By buying
politicians," The American Prospect writes of Enron,
"a favored corporation promoting a new kind of scam simply
purchased immunity from regulatory oversight."
Note that there
is no "seems," or "appears," in this sentence.
It is an outright assertion of bribery, in the cause of promoting
corporate fraud.
Given the gravity
of this charge, it would be nice if there were some evidence
for it.
What the Prospect
offers is Wendy Gramm, who "as chief commodities regulator
under Bush I, slipped in a midnight rule-change after the 1992 election
to exempt Enron's trades from oversight."
"She was
rewarded," according to the Prospect, "with a seat
on the Enron board and hundreds of thousands of dollars in income."
Sounds pretty
sinister. Except the Prospect conveniently neglects to spell
out what exactly was involved in this "Enron exemption."
Actually, it
wasn't an Enron-specific matter but a ruling that affected a whole
new class of trades — nine other companies lobbied for it —
that was coming to the fore in the early 1990s.
Here's USA
Today (apparently a more nuanced and sophisticated source than
the Prospect) on the rule: "Despite the appearance of
a trade-off, even Gramm's critics concede that the commission's
ruling was a smart move. The energy derivatives market was growing
rapidly, and there were worries that without an exemption, the Chicago
Board of Trade might sue anyone selling an energy derivative outside
of its centralized market."
I frankly don't
know enough about derivatives to say with any assurance whether
the Gramm ruling was a mistake or not, but it's obviously a subject
of dispute. So, before condemning Wendy Gramm for her venal motives,
it would be nice to hear some arguments about why she was wrong.
The Prospect
offers none.
Maybe the Prospect
thinks that the Chicago Board of Trade, which opposed this move,
was right. But wouldn't Gramm then have simply been doing the bidding
of another moneybags interest out to protect its business, the Chicago
Board of Trade?
This is why
the campaign-finance reformers, on their own terms, can always win
the argument — there are well-heeled interests on all sides
of most disputes in Washington, so someone can always be portrayed
as selling out to some interest or other.
But the Prospect's
treatment of Wendy Gramm is almost responsible compared to the way
it smears her husband: "When Enron needed another favor in
2000, her husband, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, got yet another regulation
waived."
As far as I
can tell, this is a regurgitated charge that Ramesh
Ponnuru has already dissected on NRO:
Public Citizen
had Gramm "muscling through" the offending provision.
In fact, Gramm had almost nothing to do with it.
He didn't
write it: It came to the Senate from the House, where it was part
of a bill that passed by a large margin. He didn't usher it through
the Senate: It was considered by the Agriculture Committee, of
which he was not a member, rather than the Banking Committee,
which he chaired. Indeed, Gramm blocked the bill that included
the provision for several months because he objected to other
provisions. He did, however, eventually vote for the bill, like
most congressmen. It included the offending provision, which had
hardly been altered during the legislative process.
So, what's
so amazing about the Prospect smear is that it's a discredited
one. The Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer,
and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have already run corrections
for repeating this charge.
I called American
Prospect editor Robert Kuttner to try to ask him if he's going
to do the same. He didn't return my call. But it will be interesting
to see if the Prospect, which makes such a fuss in its editorial
about "corporate accountability," cares as much about
journalistic accountability. [Ed. note — someone from the Prospect
has e-mailed saying that they will correct this.]
All this really
amounts to what campaign-finance reformers call "mud slinging."
That's why I can't understand why McCainiacs and other campaign-finance
reformers say they want to raise the level of public discourse,
when they so relentlessly run it down by imputing corrupt motives
to everyone in Washington.
In the case
the Prospect, however, this isn't quite accurate — it
wants to impute nasty motives not to everyone, but to conservatives
in particular.
"The ideology
of deregulation," it writes, "provided cover for the cronyism."
This is rather
extraordinary, to say in effect that a whole way of looking at the
world — a viewpoint based on philosophy and ideas — is
really only a cover for corruption. Not only is this a stilted,
cynical, and false charge, it is ideologically loaded.
Nowhere in
its editorial does the Prospect excoriate the Clinton administration
for signing the Kyoto treaty, something that meant a lot to Enron.
That's because regulation is presumed to be public spirited, even
if an evil corporation is pushing for it.
Part of the
liberal motive for campaign-finance reform is clearly to try to
systematically prevent American companies from protecting themselves
from government regulation. It will be a corruption-free world,
in short, only when liberals get everything they want.
Until then,
smear away.
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