Both the hypocrisy of the so-called Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2003, recently upheld as constitutional by a 5-4 Supreme Court majority, and the damaging effects of its severe restrictions on cash contributions to political campaigns, have been brought into sharp relief by the Iowa caucuses. The hypocrisy lies partially in the fact that although Congress has restricted cash donations, it cannot constitutionally limit the role of “in-kind” contributions, that is, donations of volunteers’ time. While the unrestricted possibility of such contributions is nominally fair to all candidates and hence “democratic,” in fact it tends to favor certain kinds of interest groups, and hence candidates, over others. Which groups, after all, have significant amounts of time to donate on an unpaid basis to political campaigning? Most obviously, these are college students (of the kind constituting the “Dean Swarm”), retirees, and labor-union members (the core of the Gephardt organization), for whom indirect financial compensation can easily be arranged by the unions.
In principle, there is nothing “fairer” about enhancing the political influence of students, senior citizens, and the minority of workers who are unionized at the expense of wealthier individuals who are in a position to donate substantial sums to candidates they favor. So long as the laws mandate full disclosure of all substantial cash contributions, voters themselves will decide whether the fact that a candidate has been heavily supported by executives in a particular industry, or by wealthier individuals generally, should weigh against his candidacy. (Nonpartisan scholarly studies, such as one by Janet Grenzke in the Journal of Politics in 1989, have shown that rather than influencing how congressmen vote, monetary contributions tend to support representatives who already agreed with the outlook of the contributing groups.) But in terms of what should be a more fundamental criterion for assessing the electoral process–does it promote the selection of the most able and “fit characters” (in the language of Federalist No. 10) to hold public office, and encourage the development of responsible public policies that serve the common good?–there is serious reason to doubt that a system that enhances the influence of students, retirees, and unions is desirable. While students of all political persuasions can be found working on campaigns, those whose enthusiasm endows them with the greatest passion (and makes them most likely to take an entire semester off from their studies) are “idealists” of the sort that have flocked to Dean’s banner. Flattering themselves (like their forebears in the 1960’s) that it is up to their generation to “change the world,” they gravitate to candidates who promise simple, sweeping, and heavily moralistic “solutions” to the country’s problems. And typically having most of their expenses covered by their parents, they can hardly be troubled by such crass concerns as the tax burden on working people, when candidates propose sweeping new entitlement programs. America’s growing class of comfortably retired senior citizens, meanwhile (led by AARP), display an open concern with having the government relieve them of financial burdens that lacks even the attractiveness of young people’s ostensibly altruistic political enthusiasms. (In localities populated by large numbers of retirees, seniors sometimes organize to oppose bond issues to construct new schools, figuring that they have nothing to gain from the resultant taxes.) And unions–now representing a small fraction of the private workforce, albeit a growing number of governmental employees–can hardly be said to speak for the interest of working people as a whole, let alone the entire citizenry. (While public-employee unions favor ever-growing expansions of government and oppose educational reforms like charter schools and vouchers, unions in such fields as construction have used their clout to impose “Project Labor Agreements” on major projects like Boston’s Big Dig, requiring the imposition of union work rules that exclude most contractors and workers from eligibility and significantly raising the projects’ cost.)
Those who use the mantle of “fairness” to justify restricting the ability of individuals to help finance political campaigns and “issue” advertisements are blinding others, and sometimes themselves, to their own interestedness. The real threat of corruption to the American political process nowadays comes not from businessmen who favor lower taxes or welfare and education reform, but from the power of organized groups consisting of people with time on their hands, encouraged by ambitious academics and media spokesmen, who underestimate the difficulty of the grave international problems facing us, and other groups ranging from seniors to unions to ethanol-subsidy-seeking farmers who seem less concerned with what they can do for their country than with the reverse. The result is the sordid spectacle of today’s Democratic candidates for the presidency engaging in an ever-shriller campaign of pandering and hyper-inflated rhetoric–and of a Republican administration that feels compelled to show that it, too, can provide continually expanded Medicare entitlements and other ostensible freebies without regard for their cost.
–David Lewis Schaefer is a professor of political science at Holy Cross College.