Comprehesive Campaign Reform - in 3 words

Great Debates
21

The incumbent–especially because the fund-raising restrictions that we already have in place make it more difficult for challengers. But the point is, the challenger doesn’t have to spend more than the incumbent, but he or she has to spend something to make his or her name recognizable.

(a) If both candidates spend nothing on TV ads, the incumbent wins-*.

(b) If the incumbent spends $20 million and the challenger $5 million, the challenger has a chance, because the challenger can build name recognition.

(c) In a perfect world, both candidates would spend $20 million and level the playing field. That seldom happens except when challengers self-finance. In the real world, most of the time, we’re operating in Scenario B. The OP proposes that we move to Scenario A. My point is, that will result in even more incumbent victories.

*- You may say, then why didn’t every incumbent win before television was invented? The answer is, because it was a different world–there were other ways for candidates to build name recognition. More people read newspapers, and newspapers were allowed and even expected to be openly and rabidly partisan and to advocate for favored candidates. The population was smaller, and challengers could meet more people on a personal basis. Political machines had people that walked precincts and spread the word. In today’s world, these mechanisms no longer exist; it’s advertise or be ignored.

22

Amen!

23

Wouldn’t they come back though? Seems like a false dilemma. If the only way you’ll get your guy elected is by pounding the pavement guess what people are going to do!

Not only that but it c ould spark Real Social Interaction™*. Imagen basing your vote on things other then 30 second sound bites.

*not only does it spark politicle discourse but it cuts through shoes and makes julian fries! available for three easy payments of…

24

Since you didn’t actually point out what we’re supposed to be looking at in that thread, I may have missed the point you are trying to make, but from what I can tell, there’s nothing persuasive in there at all. In fact, I don’t even think that thread is even really talking about the same subject. Some guy simply says that “because limits on campaign finance do not address the content of speech – only its volume, as it were” that putting limits on contributions is okay. There’s no substantive discussion that I can find that says that banning privately funded advertisements wouldn’t violate the First Amendment.

Please explain why a TV ad that says “Vote for John Kerry” shouldn’t constitute speech protected by the First Amendment.

25

I was under the impression there was a supreme court ruling that since broadcast tv wasn’t covered under the first amendment because it’s a shared resource.

At any rate as long they gave each candidate an equal amount of air time couldn’t the “time and place” ruling be used?

26

I linked to a particular post. Never mind, here’s what I was quoting – from The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind (The Free Press, 1995), pp. 256-259 (from before the McCain-Feingold Bill, but I don’t think the picture has changed all that much since it passed):

They don’t come much more libertarian than Goldwater, and even he was appalled at this state of affairs.

From the same book, pp. 311-313:

27

The Framers were not contemplating political “free speech” that had to be paid for. No such thing existed at the time. Even commercial advertising barely existed.

28

Who paid for the distribution and production of political tracts? The Free Speech Fairy?

29

First, on your prior post, I’m still not seeing anything that says that banning political TV ads would survive the laugh test with respect to the First Amendment. I’ll repeat: the thrust of the quoted sections is about contributions, not advertisements. Goldwater didn’t say political ads should be banned, he was talking about the negative side of forcing candidates to raise money to be competitive. Those are two different issues.

Second, the implication that the Founding Fathers would disapprove of TV ads is speculation entirely without basis. I think they’d see TV ads as the modern equivalent of the public square. You can certainly point out differences between TV and the public square, but neither one of us can reliably state what the FF might think on this issue.

What’s more, what they might think about TV ads doesn’t matter one whit. They wrote the First Amendment which prohibits Congress from abridging free speech. I simply fail to see how “Vote for John Kerry” isn’t an exercise of protected free speech. Just because there’s a price tag associated doesn’t make it not free speech, especially when the speech is on a compelling topic of public interest. The idea that paying for speech makes it not speech is absurd – does that mean that the editors of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times may be subject to government censorship because it costs them money to print the editorial page?

30

But France has only presidential elections, plus parliamentary elections in which national parties play a more important role than local candidates. American electoral culture is different. We have general elections and primaries, fought by district and state, in which candidates demand the right to be heard as individuals. American networks would go broke if they had to provide time to every presidential, House, Senate, gubernatorial, and legislative candidate!

You’d be bucking some deep social trends to make it work. People live in smaller households, in spread-out suburbs, in which women work and there is seldom anybody at home. Courts frown on forcing state and city employees to walk precincts (and rightly so!). People aren’t going to go back to reading daily local newspapers, and in an era of electronic entertainment they aren’t going to go back to thinking of meeting in town at a barbecue and listening to political oratory all afternoon (as people did in the 1890’s) as a fun weekend.

It’s depressing to think that TV ads are necessary to build a credible case against an incumbent. I wish that it weren’t so. Perhaps one day it won’t be so. But for the time being it is so, and I can’t endorse any “reform” that takes that opportunity away and makes it even easier for incumbents to win.

31

Nothing will change until we change politicians.

And I am guessing that even on this thread, not a single poster would make campaign reform a make or break for a candidate otherwise in agreement with their positions. It just seems so reasonable to overlook that if your candidate candidate is right on everything else.

Few current politicians are not beneficiaries of the current financing mechanisms, and it’s unlikely they will hurt themselves by generating real reform (as opposed to giving it lip service).

Campaign financing reform is a fun, but totally academic debate.

32

There should only be one campaign finance ‘reform’: Disclosure. Make sure every nickel of every contribution can be traced through public records.

That’s it. Let people spend what they want, where they want. One person’s ‘lobbyist’ is another person’s fighter for the little guy. And money IS speech if it takes money to be heard. Chile managed to block opposition speech quite effectively by taxing newsprint by an exhorbitant amount.

People who advocate for these types of reform are usually A) incumbents, who always benefit from restrictions on money raising, and B) people who think that the campaign restrictions will disproportionately hurt ‘the other side’.

With the rise of the internet and the vast dollars the grassroots can raise, there’s even less of a reason to have finance restrictions than there was 10 years ago. CFR should be scrapped as a violation of the first amendment and as counterproductive to the functioning of a democracy.

33

I’m not sure, but I believe pamphlets like Paine’s Common Sense were sold cheap in the streets, like newspapers. Political columns like The Federalist were printed in newspapers without any money changing hands, like letters to the editor now. And, again, I’m not sure, but I don’t think newspapers started selling non-classified advertising space until decades later.

34

Personally, I think eliminating campaign commercials would be a bad thing.

I don’t believe what I hear, but I used it as a starting point to judge what ideological ground each candidate is staking out. If a candidate says “I believe in issue X,” I’ll want to know what their voting record is on it, but if issue X is important to me, that gives me a baseline reading on the candidate. Without that information, given how spotty and biased coverage is in the media (especially coverage of local issues and candidates), I wouldn’t get to hear much of the candidates’ points of view.

The newspapers, which were HEAVILY involved in the political process, and often extremely biased.

Sure, but define “candidate.” I see two possibilities here:

  1. Anyone who wants to be a candidate is, and qualifies for free air time: The airwaves would be filled with idiots trying to get free publicity and the serious candidates couldn’t cut through the static.

  2. You must be supported by a major party to be considered a candidate: This would just strengthen the big parties and kill off independents.

  3. You must provide evidence of support through petitions from all 50 states (similar to today’s system): Only people with enough money to create PR and fight their way up through the system would ever qualify as candidates, unless they were supported by one of the big parties (we’re back to money again).

35

Newspapers back then were mostly ads. Here’s a page from the Massachusetts Centinal, a Federalist paper from 1790. As you can see, all ads:

36

But those are all what we would now call “classified” as opposed to “display” ads, and none of them are political.

37

I don’t know…the three boats for sale all have a picture of a boat next to them, so that’s sort of a display ad. :slight_smile: But the lack of display advertising is more of a technological thing than anything else. Newspapers back then didn’t tend to have a wide variety of fonts, it was difficult, expensive, and time consuming to put in pictures, and the presses of the time made non-standardized column spacing difficult.

And the ads aren’t political because the paper is political…it’s a Federalist newspaper. You don’t have to run ads for your cause in the paper when you own the paper; your views get printed for free.

38

But if you lived in France (see post #18), you would learn as much as you wanted, and more, about every candidate’s stated views.

39

And if we lived in France, we’d all be smoking Gaulloise and enjoying universal health care. On the other hand, if we were all Jewish, none of us would be eating shellfish. None of that has anything to do with the Bill of Rights.

Stop dancing around the point and explain why you think the First Amendment doesn’t protect political speech. Is it really only because you think political campaigns didn’t spend money in the 18th century, and you’re concerned about whether or not political ads in bygone years had fancy graphics? Even still, what does that have to do with the Constitutional guarantee of free speech?

40

Better hope Congress doesn’t agree with you, what with your paying to post here and all.