This is not a political blog, and the topic has nothing to do with biology or music, but a few days from a presidential election, it is more topical to mull over campaign money and where we go from here, now that public finance is clearly dead in presidential elections.

Ever since 2000, many of us have thought that the electoral college is a problem in U.S. presidential elections. Not only can a candidate win the election without winning the popular vote, but perhaps more important was the fact that all the campaigning has recently been done in just a dozen or so "swing states," making a large number of voters in the country frustrated that their vote does not count.

What happened this year was that Barack Obama changed all that, by spending a ton of money. The number of states he campaigned in this year was not 50, but it was a lot greater than those he ignored. And the campaigning has not been haphazard, but involves lots of highly organized offices and ground operations. His vast resources have allowed him to campaign not only for the electoral college vote, but for the popular vote as well, which is crucial to his big-tent message.

It's an interesting quandary. There has been some grousing about how Obama's money gives him a big advantage, but not much, because of course it has always been the republicans who have argued most strongly against limits. Many people are generally in favor of campaign finance reform, because the amount of money spent and how it is spent (even forgetting $150,000 wardrobes and $400 haircuts) seems obscene even in flusher economic times. Other people make the reasonable argument that restrictive laws conflict with constitutional free speech. And, there is no doubt that it was the rejection of public money spending limits by Obama that caused my state of Montana to be in play this year.

Is it possible to stay on this trajectory of a truly national election without donors buying candidates? Obama does have a point when he shows the large number of donations he has received under $200, a benefit of the Internet age, but the truth is both campaigns continue to rely on the big donors and "bundlers" for a large chunk of their operations. Perhaps instead of legislating restrictions that always have loopholes, and may be unconstitutional anyway, we could instead legislate incentives to redirect money in directions which might enhance participation in democracy, rather than stifle it as has been the case in the last couple of elections before this one.

One obvious way to go would be to allocate a bigger chunk of the public airwaves (television and radio) to public service, which in election years could be divided up among the major candidates. Obama's infomercial brings this issue to the forefront. It should have been free, and McCain should have had equal prime time to make his own case. It simply is not right that a democratic nation should require candidates to pay businesses to get their message across, when the airwaves are really owned by the public. Who decides how to allocate the space? The Commission on Presidential Debates decides who gets to debate, and they could use the same criteria for broadcast time. (Although some might certainly argue that the CPD is too biased against third-party candidates, that is a separate issue.)

It would be really nice for most of us if, in exchange for this time, the candidates or parties were not allowed to buy additional commercial advertising time, but this bumps up against those pesky first amendment considerations. So the endless attack ads should be allowed to continue even under the above system.

As for the mountains of fliers in the mail, everyone sending unsolicited junk mail should be required to pay a landfill tax whose rate is based on the volume they send. Without in any way infringing on free speech, this would more fairly balance the cost/benefit ratio of bulk mail because individuals and communities now must pay the disposal cost, without incurring any benefit. In a political campaign, it might create an incentive to spend the money somewhere else, such as in local campaign offices.

Finally, there should be a tax on total campaign spending that goes directly in a per-capita allocation to local nonpartisan election commissions for get-out-the-vote efforts. If counties had the money to do more active voter registration, we would have less need for organizations (such as the much maligned ACORN) that are funded by private donations. Under such a system, a movement toward standardization of registration procedures across states and counties could be more easily encouraged and implemented. Perhaps the controversies surrounding voter registration, whether real or imagined, could then be mitigated somewhat.

There is no way to get the money out of political campaigns. True reform should promote a level playing field through how money is spent, rather than how much. Done right, this could promote engagement rather than disenfranchisement in the democratic process, in a way that simple donation and spending limits cannot.

Labels: money, politics