3.30.00
Bush's Opportunity

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

inally, after a years-long drought, Republicans have a bold new big-government proposal to oppose. The Democrats' tack since 1994 — in keeping with the brilliant strategic advice of Dick Morris — has been to avoid giving Republicans juicy targets. Now, in his zeal to out-McCain even John McCain, Al Gore has produced a campaign-finance plan that represents exactly the sort of liberal excess that Democrats lately had been avoiding. There should be high-fives all-around in Austin.

Gore is playing Wilson to McCain's TR, teasing out the full-blown liberalism implicit in McCain's inchoate progressivism. The vice president's proposal is in perfect keeping with Hillary Clinton's disastrous health-care plan. It empowers bureaucrats and Washington politicians, depends on a thicket of new rules, and stamps out entrepreneurship (in this case, political rather than medical innovation is discouraged). And, if the Bush campaign only realizes it, it is vulnerable to exactly the sort of populist, anti-Washington assault that doomed Hillary Care.

What Gore fails to understand is that the reform sentiment that propelled John McCain was essentially anti-Washington. Bush can play to exactly that sentiment by attacking the vice president for wanting to hand control over congressional elections to an unelected commission somewhere inside the Beltway. What American politics needs, Bush can argue, is a more robust, open process — not more control for federal experts and bureaucrats, who are already too powerful.

Experts and bureaucrats, of course, are never popular. The mistake Hillary made in 1993 was to convince herself that a health-care "crisis" would make what had always been extremely unpopular — socialized medicine — suddenly palatable to the American people. The problem was that this "crisis" was entirely a product of the media’s, and the Clinton administration's, imagination. Gore similarly thinks that the campaign-finance "crisis" — another media creation — will suddenly change the public's attitude toward public financing of elections.

It won't, at least not if Bush holds his ground. Because another of the lessons of the health-care fight is that Republicans were strongest when they attacked Hillary's plan root and branch, disagreeing both with her diagnosis of the problem and her proposed solution. Bush should maintain a similar stance vis-à-vis Gore's campaign-finance plan, giving away none of the premises — or at least no more than he has already — of the case against the campaign regulators, e.g. that "independent expenditures" aren't a problem, but part of the free-wheeling political discussion guaranteed by the First Amendment.

This suggests another way that Bush can turn part of McCain's appeal against Gore's plan. McCain proved that there's a hankering in the country for an old-fashioned patriotism. Opposing Gore's plan might be one opportunity for Bush to invoke it, because stopping the plan is a way to protect American self-government. Gore says Bush is aligned with the "status quo," a charge that should be wrong in one sense, but true in another.

Bush should want to reform Washington because he wants to preserve the constitutional order, from overweening federal judges, from powerful special interests like the trial lawyers who unilaterally force social changes, and from Al Gore — all of whom, one way or another, want to lessen the opportunity for democratic decision-making and action. Bush can readily invoke the Founders in making his anti-Gore case — Fred Wertheimer might like the Gore plan, but James Madison sure as hell wouldn't.

So, there is a major opportunity here for Bush, if he decides not just to play defense on campaign finance. Bush should give a major set-speech denouncing Gore's proposed "take over" of the American election system, and contrasting Gore's vision of an American democracy policed by federal commissioners, with one of a vigorous republic enlivened by active and free citizen-patriots. Maybe he should deliver it on Lexington Bridge.

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