The recent wave of campaign reform legislation has succeeded in removing the big buck from national politics. That was the intention and that has been the result, a rare bullseye for the federal blunderbuss. The big giver, the man who in past campaigns might have popped for seven figures, is a thing of the past. It was no accident, comrade, that these fellows tended to be disproportionately Republican.
As with all federal regulation, however, one must display some patience in the interval between the dropping of the two shoes. That patience has now been rewarded. It is unmistakably clear that the big giver has been replaced by the direct-mail giver and by the PAC (political action committee) giver. These men and women—there is no sexism in the age of the small giver— tend to be disproportionately conservative. (One wonders how much legislative success campaign reform would have enjoyed had it sailed under the rhetorical banner, “The National Political Action Committee Preservation Act” or “The Richard Viguerie Relief Act.”) With the stream of FEC data now confirming the conservative bias of small contributions, we sense an historic opportunity to further campaign reform. . . .
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