3.28.00
A Risky Campaign-Finance Scheme

3.24.00
Johnny PAC

3.22.00
Gary Bauer's John McCain

3.21.00
Re-entry

he vice president's campaign-finance reform speech on Monday was classic Al Gore — let's count the ways.

1) It had a creepy quality. Gore tried to burnish his own tarnished reform credentials by brandishing the political corpse of his father, who, according to Gore, "lost his Senate seat . . . in part because of the special interest money that was funneled into his opponent's campaign by the Nixon dirty tricks operation." Why is it that everything Gore opposes must somehow have led to a Gore family tragedy?

2) It was dishonest. Gore explained that he engaged in his notorious fund-raising practices in 1996 because the Democrats couldn't "unilaterally disarm." But Republicans weren't raising illegal foreign funds and lying about it. This is just another version of the "everybody does it" defense.

3) It was ham-handed. Gore is making a laughably obvious play for the fabled "McCain voters." Gore, of course, can't just endorse the McCain-Feingold bill, but has to propose essentially abolishing the current elections system to prove he REALLY, REALLY, REALLY cares about campaign-finance reform.

4) It was gimmicky. No one believes Gore's proposal for a $7 billion "Democracy Endowment" will ever come to pass, any more than anyone believed Gore's proposal to pull all his TV advertising during his race with Bradley would happen. It’s just a sound-bite, repeated again and again for effect.

5) Finally, and most importantly, it was socialistic. What Hillary Clinton wanted to do with health care in 1993, Al Gore is now proposing for the American elections system — crushing it under the heel of bureaucrats and government commissions. Gore's "Democracy Endowment" — built up with tax-deductible contributions, then divvied out to House and Senate candidates who agree to accept no other funding — is explicitly meant to shield candidates from the influence of political parties, interest groups, and individual donors — in other words, from democratic pressure.

Gore also wants to strong-arm the Federal Communications Commission, without even passing any new legislation, into requiring broadcasters to give candidates free air time whenever the TV stations broadcast political ads bought by independent groups. This would pressure stations into not accepting ads from independent groups that might "irresponsibly" criticize politicians. And, as a "first step" toward these changes, Gore wants to pass the thicket of new rules contained in the McCain-Feingold bill. His plan would create an American democracy of the regulators, by the regulators, and for the regulators.

This is the very definition of a liberal, big-government plan, one that the American founders would have abhorred. George W. Bush couldn't ask for a fatter target.

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