Beyond Hypocrisy: Thoughts On Campaign Finance Regulations

Mocking the president's grossly hypocritical new anti-527 stance is fun. It's also fun to note that they've obviously sent him and Scott McClellan out there to say this stuff without having given any consideration whatsoever to the topic as a policy issue since they're clearly miles away from an operationizable definition of what, exactly, they mean by "shadowy groups." At some point, though, you need to go beyond poking fun and crying "hypocrite!" to talk about substance. One of the few things Bush was right about during the 2000 campaign, both during its anti-McCain phase and its anti-Gore phase, was that the McCain-Feingold bill (now the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act) was a bad idea. The intention was, I think, admirable but there's simply no way to efficaciously "take [some of the] money out of politics" without placing intolerable restrictions on core liberties like the freedom of association and the freedom of speech.

Disclosure rules, which limit corruption by creating some counterveiling embarrassment, are welcome, not only for political campaigns, but for any corporation (profit or non-profit, political per se or otherwise). If, on the other hand, you're less concerned about corruption than by the structural inequality in political power creating by the need to raise funds (and I think you should be) then the only viable solutions are supply-side ones. Things like free television time, various public financing schemes and so forth reduce the demand for and importance of, money. McCain-Feingold is trying to do something that could only really be achieved by the means of something (like Bush's proposal) that would be draconian and wrong.