Election spending only an issue for faux conservatives
From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday's probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign's closing days.
Some polls show Palin has become an even heavier weight in John McCain's saddle than is his association with George W. Bush. Did McCain, who seems to think Palin's never having attended a "Georgetown cocktail party" is sufficient qualification, lift an eyebrow when she said vice presidents "are in charge of the United States Senate"?
She may have been tailoring her narrative to her audience of third-graders, who do not know that vice presidents have no constitutional function in the Senate other than to cast tiebreaking votes. Perhaps Palin's confusion about the office for which she is auditioning comes from listening to its current occupant. Dick Cheney, the foremost practitioner of this administration's constitutional carelessness. His situational constitutionalism has led him to assert, when claiming exemption from a particular executive order, that he is a member of the legislative branch, and, when seeking to shield certain deliberations from legislative inquiry, to say he is a member of the executive branch.
Palin may be an inveterate simplifier; McCain has a history of reducing controversies to cartoons. A Republican financial expert recalls attending a dinner with McCain to discuss complexities that clearly did not fascinate the senator. As the dinner ended, McCain's question for his briefer was: "So, who is the villain?"
McCain revived a villain - "huge amounts" of political money - when Barack Obama announced he raised $150 million in September. "The dam is broken," said McCain, whose constitutional carelessness involves wanting to multiply impediments to participate by contributing to candidates - such as the 632,000 first-time givers that month.
"We're now going to see," McCain warned, "huge amounts of money coming into political campaigns, and we know history tells us that always leads to scandal." The supposedly inevitable scandal, which supposedly justifies pre-emptive government restrictions on Americans' freedom to fund the dissemination of political ideas they favor, presumably is that Obama will be pressured to give favors to his givers. The contributions by the new givers that month averaged $86.
One excellent result of this election cycle is that public financing of presidential campaigns now seems sillier than ever. The public has always disliked it: Voluntary and cost-free participation, using the checkoff on the income tax form, peaked at 28.7 percent in 1980 and has sagged to 9.2 percent. The Washington Post says there were three reasons for creating public financing: to free candidates from the demands of fundraising, to level the playing field and "to limit the amount of money pouring into presidential campaigns." The first reason is decreasingly persuasive because fundraising is increasingly easy because of new technologies, such as the Internet. The second reason is, the Supreme Court says, constitutionally impermissible. Government may not mandate equality of resources among competitors who earn different levels of voluntary support. As for the third - "huge amounts" (McCain) of money - well:
The Center for Responsive Politics calculates that by Election Day $2.4 billion will have been spent on presidential campaigns in the two-year election cycle that began January 2007, and another $2.9 billion will have been spent on 435 House and 35 Senate contests. This $5.3 billion is a billion less than Americans will spend this year on potato chips.
© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group