January 7, 2003

In this issue

CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM sometimes feels like a doomed effort. You try limiting individual campaign contributions, and the special interests come up with political action committees. You limit PACs, and there's still soft money. You try to limit soft money, and pretty soon you run up against the U.S. Supreme Court, which says (Buckley v. Valeo) that a rich person or a rich organization has every right to spend his, her, or its own money on political ads because that's free speech.

I could certainly argue that allowing Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to spend several million dollars opposing public power amounts to drowning out the free speech of the people on the other side, but that doesn't go very far in court.

Anyone with any sense knows that the only real solution is full public financing of all campaigns – combined with a strong disincentive for anyone to spend outside money on any candidate or initiative. (One good plan: Every dollar in hard or soft money that is spent supporting or opposing a candidate or position is matched – maybe even matched two-to-one – with public funds for the other side. Let's say, for example, that every candidate for mayor who reaches some agreed-on threshold of credibility gets $1 million in public money for the campaign. Then if the Committee on Jobs or Don Fisher or Gordon Getty decides to spend another $1 million to promote a certain candidate, all of the other candidates immediately get an additional $2 million in public money. That would stop the flow of special-interest cash pretty quickly.)

But public financing is a tough sell (even though the money the public would save when politicians stopped answering to campaign contributors would far outweigh the cash costs). So sometimes, it's all you can do to just stop things from getting worse.

Which is why everyone ought to oppose the plan coming out of the Mayor's Office to end paid arguments in the voter handbook (see "Ballot Blackout?," page 14).

Sure, the paid arguments are sometimes used to create the illusion of grassroots support for a bogus measure. Sometimes they're wacky. They use up a lot of space and make the ballot handbook big and expensive to print and mail. But where else can your average activist get a chance to speak to every registered voter for just a few hundred bucks?

Besides, it makes the ballot handbook worth reading.