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John Anderson

John B. Anderson, a 10-term Republican U.S. representative from Illinois, was a Republican presidential candidate in 1980. He received more than 6 million votes in that year’s general election as the National Unity Party nominee. Anderson is now a distinguished visiting professor of law at Nova Southeastern University.

Jules Witcover interviewed Anderson on April 21, 2008.

I would just like to have a little conversation with you about the state of campaign finance, and I think probably the best place to get started is to hear what you have to say about the future of the whole campaign finance reform movement that you were under. I want to explore a little bit. I don’t remember that well, back that far, whether you took match money. Did you take [matching funds]?

When I ran for president, you mean? I started running for Congress, of course, in 1960. Then I ran as an independent candidate in 1980 and post-election because I got more than 5 percent. I got just under 7 percent of the total popular vote. I did get, retroactively, a payment of about $4.5 million. Of course, that was a lifesaver. Other than that, I would have been probably working in a coal mine somewhere today instead of talking to you here in my home. I would have been that much in debt trying to dig myself out. It was all post-election.

How did you sustain your campaign before you got that money?

Well, we got small contributions, of course. I think the total expenditures of the campaign, from the time that I announced in late April or thereabouts in 1980 until it was all over, I think that the total campaign budget was about $14.5 million. We did raise all but the $4.5 million, so that would be about $10 million. We did raise about $10 million. Some of it was in the form of loans that we got and then tried to repay as we got in cash contributions later on in the campaign. Most of it was in small contributions.

I remember we had one single contribution from a political action committee, and that was NARAL, the National Abortion Rights [Action] League. I was, of course, very strongly pro-choice. Both [Jimmy] Carter and [Ronald] Reagan went the other way. They were anti-abortion. I early on had decided that I was pro-choice. I voted against the anti-abortion legislation that was in the Congress while I was there. They always tack it on, tried to tack it on as a rider. I’m trying to think of the name, a single member of Congress that was famous for that. We only had one on the Democratic side of the aisle and one on the Republican united. They were forever trying to put riders on spending bills that no expenditures could be made that would in any way permit a woman to choose. They gave me $5,000, but that was, truthfully and honestly, the only PAC contribution of that presidential campaign. 

Did you run as a Republican first?

I ran as a Republican. I declared as a Republican and participated in their early primaries in New Hampshire. I didn’t really campaign in Iowa because I was so weakly organized, having newly emerged as an independent after first running as a Republican. I do remember campaigning on the ground in that Republican Primary in New Hampshire, and I was number four. The magic number was you had to be in the top three to really be considered to have a staying power. That was a little discouraging.

Then very soon after Illinois, the last primary that I was in was Illinois, my home state. Reagan beat me there. I think he got 47 percent and I got 36 or 37 percent. So a respectable vote, but nevertheless, he won. Of course I was counting on Illinois, my home state, although Reagan, as you well know, was born in Tampico, Illinois, in Whiteside County. He was a lifeguard and saved all those lives in the Rock River as a lifeguard. He played on that Illinois background as much as I did.

Anyway, I quit shortly after the die was cast when I lost that March primary. I think I hung on for a few weeks. By the end of April, I let it be known that I was going to start filing petitions to get on the ballot by signature, get on the ballot of various states. From April of ’80 to November of ’80, however many months that is, I was running as an independent.

Did you decide to do that on your own or were there groups of people who pushed you to run?

No, no, no. There was a great push on the part of my more avid supporters. At that time, Norman Lear was active in my campaign. As a matter of fact, he was the one big financial operator that helped me in Massachusetts. I had run in that primary and George [H.W.] Bush had claimed Massachusetts then as his home state, George 41 we call him, Papa Bush. He claimed Massachusetts because he was actually born in Belmont or somewhere up there. He only beat me by 11 points. I got about 37 and he got 48 percent of the vote.

I remember there was this front-page column-right story in The New York Times that Anderson goes back to the Midwest as a formidable contender for the Republican nomination having placed second in Massachusetts and in Vermont, which was another early primary Reagan won. I ran a very close second to Reagan and I think he beat me by less than 1,000 votes. I think he won by 700 or 800 votes. I was considered as somebody who had some strength at least in the states like Vermont and Massachusetts. Then I went to the Midwest and quickly discovered that in my heartland where I should have been the favorite son, I was, in fact, not going to win. I then declared in late April and got on the ballot of all 50 states, ultimately, by petition — more than 2 million names subscribed to petitions.

One time I had court cases going in nine states. One case went all the way to the Supreme Court from Ohio, which they didn’t decide until after the election. I won 5-to-4, Anderson vs. Celebrezze [Anthony J. Celebrezze Jr. was the Ohio secretary of state]. I had John Paul Stevens, who’s still on the court, write the opinion. I invited him to my law school recently. He says he still has my picture on the wall of his Supreme Court chambers because he was very much for me. He wrote the opinion in Anderson vs. Celebrezze saying that I had a right to be on the ballot. They had a very restrictive ballot access law that he voted to strike down.

What happened to the money then? You didn’t run four years later.

No, no.

What happened to that money that you got?

It was all to creditors. I paid off all of my debts. It was totally expended. There was no bonus for me, believe me. You couldn’t. You had to report back to the FEC that you had expended the money for legitimate campaign debts. I did end up debt free with my debts paid off with that federal payment.

Do you think that subsidy program was a good program? It really worked for a long, long time.

It worked, but then along came the 527s. If you read the record that they began to compile once they discovered that loophole in the law — that people could give to a 527 and then they could go out and spend money that, in effect, was backing a candidate even though they were purportedly organized for another purpose. They would still see that money was spent on ads that totally favored the views of a particular candidate in a presidential race. It was the same as contributing to a fund for a fellow to run his own campaign ads. So the 527s, as far as I’m concerned, have made the much heralded McCain-Feingold Act absolutely a cipher as far as any real campaign finance reform.

Didn’t George W. Bush go off on his own before 527s were in the picture?

Well, the law did permit candidates to be independently financed, but you’re talking about Papa Bush.

I’m talking about Junior.

Oh, about Junior?

He was the first one to pass up the matching money in 2000.

Yeah, that’s true. The law made that perfectly possible for people to be self-financed. Of course, there is a loophole so wide you could drive a freight train through it. If people qualified for the ballot to run for president, it seems to me they should have been subject to the Federal Campaign Finance Law, weak as it was and ineffective, for the reason I just stated: the formation of the so-called independent 527 committees to go out and spend money.

I have always made the argument, Jules, that certainly everybody recognizes the states’ rights notwithstanding. It’s perfectly constitutional for the federal government to do what they did way back when [Dwight] Eisenhower was president and pass a Federal Highway Act that made the federal government the principal financier of a national interstate highway system. Without it, it would have never been built. I think if it is public business for automobiles and trucks and vehicles of all kinds to travel the public highways, a public election is quintessentially a public function that ought to be funded by the federal government. That’s the only way you will ever get around the opening up of these huge loopholes in a law like McCain-Feingold that was totally, totally a waste of time as far as preventing the influence of big money on a presidential election, both in the first election and the reelection of George W. Bush.

There are quite a few election cycles. Candidates agreed to take the federal money and they all stayed in the system. It seemed to work until George W. Bush elected to go on his own.

Yes. Well, it worked and it didn’t work. I’m not excusing Bush for what he did. I think he should have subjected himself to the discipline of the Federal Financing Act as it existed. My point is that I think that the act has been demonstrated to be a failure. Actually, I’m embarrassed to tell you this because I don’t have a copy extant. Way back, I think it was 1988, that long ago — that’s 20 years ago — the 20th Century Fund, which is now the Century Fund, financed my work on putting together what turned out to be a monograph. I don’t think you could call it a book because it was only 80 pages, although there are books that short. It was, in essence, although bound, an 80-page monograph called A More Perfect Institution. I only have one copy and it sits on my shelf in my office library down at the law school where I have been teaching for 20 years. I don’t even have a copy here at home.

I have one here where I talk about public financing of campaigns that I wrote called Vision and Betrayal in America that I probably ought to print now. I could lend you a copy because I do have two copies of that if you promise to give it back. It was supposed to sell well enough to pay to put one of my five kids through college, but it never did. It was published by Word Books. Anyway, I do have several pages on, well, I guess this chapter. It’s been a long time since I looked at it. Chapter Three: The Crisis of American Institutions. In Chapter Three of that book, beginning on page 38 in a paragraph called “The Need for American Reform” and for several pages [I wrote about] how we had to have publicly financed campaigns. Also, in my biography, there will be recorded the fact that in 1974, I’m sure it was ’74, the late Mo Udall, Morris K, my beloved friend, now deceased, who was my best buddy, he was a Democrat on that side of the aisle and I, a Republican.

One of my favorite candidates of all times.

Oh, I loved that guy. You know, if he had been elected — this is an aside — I would have been in his Cabinet. We were that close. When he lost to Carter, and he lost in Wisconsin where he should have won, a progressive state, I think he would have swept the boards if he had gotten past that barrier. I wonder. He and I introduced what was called the Udall-Anderson Campaign Finance Reform Act. It actually got, I think, 188 votes in that session of Congress. It didn’t pass but it came darn close. It was a very modest matching-funds bill where for every $100 contribution, you could match from the Federal Checkoff Fund, which initially was established in the 1970 Campaign Finance Law. You could match a $100 contribution for your candidate for Congress with $100 from the federal fund. It died then. It got 188 votes and was over and done with.

Then along came McCain-Feingold, of course. As I say, even though I believed totally on the idea at the time, I have since been totally converted to the idea that total public financing, even as we finance roads and bridges and highways and other public structures, that the public structure of our democracy deserves the kind of financial support that would eliminate the mendacity of so many of the people who give to campaigns only because they can then knock on the door after the election and say, “Here I am; reward me.” I’m a total advocate of total public financing. I think these halfway measures that Mo and I tried and then McCain more recently, along with Feingold, are doomed for failure.

Are we further away now than ever to having public financing?

I’m afraid we are. I almost despair. You had the horrible scandals of the Harding administration where you sent [Albert] Fall and somebody else to prison for selling off the government’s oil interests to big donors to the Harding campaign. I supposed it would take a scandal of such gargantuan proportions that I don’t even want it to happen. It would be so terrible. You can change the public attitude. “Politicians ought to pay for their races. They shouldn’t come hat in hand with a begging bowl and expect the taxpayers to pay for campaigns.” There was a story in The Post this morning about this guy.

I’m going up tomorrow morning to listen to that Supreme Court argument. The case is going to be heard tomorrow morning. I’m a member of the Supreme Court Bar even though I don’t practice. I think I can stand in line and get in. I want to hear what the justices have to say about this guy. Anyway, total public financing is, for me, the only solution.

What do you think can happen now? It seems like any candidate who tries to use the existing system is going to be overwhelmed.

It’s broken. Frankly, I don’t know, as long as the Supreme Court clings to this notion that the only way you can regulate campaign finance is to establish a linkage between the candidate, the donee and the donor, the contributor, the giver, that there’s corruption. Campaign contributions introduce the possibility of corrupting a candidate. You’ve got to establish that predicate of corruption.

To me, it’s self-evident that our system is corrupt when they’re spending the kind of money that was spent in the last campaign: $200 million, $300 million, who knows? I think that it ought to be an entirely different concept that we are regulating the election and contributions are an ineffable and inescapable part of the electoral process. People do have to advertise. They do have to get out their message. I accept that. It should be a public expense and a public expenditure.

You can lay down qualifications that a fellow has to prove his seriousness by getting so much money in small contributions to establish that he’s worthy of being considered. I’m not so naïve as to think we should encourage every Tom, Dick, and Harry to think, “Well, as long as the public is paying for the campaign, then why not?” He’s got to establish his or her bona fides as a candidate by reaching a certain level of small, limited, individual contributions. Then it’s the job of the federal government. That threshold would be nowhere near the amount that will be needed to carry on the whole campaign. It will just be a test of public acceptability to the point where it’s rational to assume that this person should be running and can stay the course and be a legitimate candidate.

What about the basic judgment that a candidate can spend his own money, as much as he wants? Isn’t that a monkey race?

No. I don’t think that I accept that premise, that you should be able to buy public office. If you accept that thesis, it’s like this guy in the article. He’s spending his own money. Politics is not a plaything. Public office is a public trust, and you don’t establish a right to a public trust by establishing the fact that you are bona fide because you have so much money. No. I rule out totally the idea that as long as a man is rich enough, let him go ahead and spend his own money. This should be a concern of the courts who sit in judgment on whether or not our system is functioning and operating in a truly democratic manner. I just don’t accept that idea.

What about the central question of whether spending your own money is protected under the First Amendment?

No. I realize Buckley v. Valeo equated spending money with freedom of speech, First Amendment. My good friend, J. Skelly Wright who was chief judge of the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in the lower court decision where he wrote the opinion that was then overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the appeal from that court, he just flatly said: “Money is property. Money is property. It is not speech. We cannot equate the spending of money with the ability of people to speak.”

Money is property, and we should not elect people on the basis of the fact they have so much property that they can go out and commandeer the advertising and the press attention and all the other TV that is required to be successful as a candidate. I just reject the whole idea.

In a practical manner, though, how could that ever be reversed?

How could you reverse the speech idea? Well, it’s going to be difficult, my God, particularly with [Samuel] Alito and John Roberts now on the court. That’s very difficult. People like me can stand on the hustings and scream and holler forever and it isn’t going to do much good. Unfortunately, that concept that money is speech is so ingrained in our whole, I think, misbegotten and jaded concept of what democracy is. Democracy isn’t just how many people with money can get out and commandeer the channels of communication and then say: “Here am I, Lord. Send me to this higher office.”

I don’t know. I’m kind of whistling Dixie, as the old saying goes. There are people on the Supreme Court like John Paul Stevens that agree with me. I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg would agree with me. Stephen Breyer, I’m a little dubious. Hopefully he might. You go beyond those three on the present court and I think you would have six voices that say forever, “You cannot limit speech by limiting the amount of a person’s own estate that he wants to spend to obtain office.”

Given that rather pessimistic view, which I think is undeniable, do you see any halfway measures that can do anything to dampen down the money situation?

Get a copy of the Century Fund — it used to be the 20th Century Fund. It was written 20 years ago. I haven’t looked at it that recently myself. It outlined a rather specific and maybe overly-elaborate program where the government would fund public forums and public debates and public discussion groups that could meet around the country over the entire period of the campaign. The candidates, if they had enough signatures on a petition so that they were viable — you can’t have every shirt who thinks he ought to be president running — but with some restrictions with respect to how you establish creditability, which is easier spoken of than accomplished.

It would set up public forum and opportunities for candidates to speak in public assemblies from early on in the campaign right down to November, obviously, and use what I think is the unlimited right of free speech under the First Amendment for candidates to be heard. To drive money out of politics, there are modifications of my idea that probably would not be too extreme where you would have a certain basic threshold amount, but so nominal it wouldn’t carry with it the attached suspicion that people were giving the money because they thought they were buying influence. You might have to allow some seed money to go to would-be candidates so that they would get enough of an audience and qualify in turn to engage in public discussion at these publicly sponsored forums that I would establish.

I would put government, rather than the candidates, in charge of the campaign. People who don’t like government are going to throw their hands up in horror instantly and say: “If anybody can foul it up, government will. You’ve got to let people do it on their own.” I don’t think we should take that. That’s like saying that if we’re going to have a highway system and transport goods and services across the country, every Tom, Dick, and Harry should go out there and build his own road and so forth.

I think we’ve got to structure our campaigns based on this thesis that it is public forum and the right to appear and publicly discuss and be heard that are important — not all of this folderol that goes on with even in the race that’s going to be decided tomorrow. The best-intended candidates have to go on the attack if they’re going to remain credible.

What about the calendar and what’s happening?

It’s going to be a lengthy process. You would have to start early on. I know that there’s some drawback that a lot of people don’t get really interested in who the heck is running and who do I vote for. It may be until the last minute. Again, a public education campaign to tell people: “This is your election. These are your officials. You’ve got to start now to afford yourself of the opportunity to go to these public meetings and these public assemblies and hear what they have to say.”

So I would couple the electoral process itself with a public education campaign to wake up those sleepy voters that maybe don’t start to worry about who should be elected until it’s too late for them to do anything about it anyway.

Before this current cycle started, the anticipation was, with all the frontloading of the primaries, it would all be over February 5. There was concern about how terrible that would be. Now it’s gone on, and it still could go on to the convention. What’s wrong with that? If the decision is open, that is if they haven’t picked anybody — do you know what the Delaware plan is? Have you heard of that?

It kind of strikes a bell. You’ll have to tell me.

State primaries would be grouped every month or so, starting with the smallest states so that nobody would amass enough delegates to be nominated. The major states would weigh in at the end of the process, which is basically what we’ve evolved into just by accident this time around, right?

Right. I don’t think that’s a bad idea. I don’t know why people should leap to the conclusion that campaigns are boring and that we are going to end up with an over-educated electorate. We need all the education on the issue.

The problem with a lengthy campaign, as we are beginning to see in the current contest between Hillary and my man Obama, is that a little bitterness creeps in and the elbows get sharper. Some kidney punches are thrown and so forth. Human nature being what it is, I don’t expect perfection. I’m not dismayed simply by the fact that I am advocating, in what I just described to you, the kind of electoral campaign that would take some time and it would play itself out over many months.

It would be under public auspices and would not, I think, encourage your kind of frontloading with money and buying influence that is going on. I think that Obama has been truly remarkable in educating voters to the fact that to be meaningful as contributors, they don’t have to go up to the maximum, which is $2,300. They can give $100 a month, which is what I give to him because I am that anxious to see him succeed.

If we could re-educate people to the necessity of seeing that all of us have a responsibility to dig down and come up with a few bucks every month, to make sure these public meetings can be properly financed by the government, fine. To heck with these $2,300 givers and $4,600 for a couple and all that.

I can remember, and I’m sure you can, occasions where the choice that was made in a hurry was regretted, buyer’s remorse it’s called. George McGovern was an example of that. A lot of Democrats thought he couldn’t win and it turned out to be true. Jimmy Carter, they just didn’t like him. They wanted another choice. Remember 1976? Frank Church and Jerry Brown jumped into the race too late. That was another example of buyer’s remorse. So if you have a long process of the sort that you talked about or that we’ve had in some places, isn’t that just as important for candidates?

I think it is. Why insist that we have to have these crisply-run, short campaigns, no matter if they’re financed by big givers or not, and we’re going to get bored if we have to hear too much? What the heck? Even with the best of candidates, you aren’t going to know everything that you ought to know about every issue. So, no, the idea of an extended campaign which serves to educate the American people, not just about the personality of the candidate and whether or not he can tell a good story and crack a joke and take a blow without collapsing, I think to stand up under the strain of a longer campaign where issues are more extensively debated in the sense that we want to educate the public on this side and that side and center side of this issue, I think would be healthy for our democracy.

The question is how do we get there?

How do we get there? We couldn’t pass Anderson-Udall with small matching fund contributions way back when. As I say, I’m not disparaging the efforts that McCain and Feingold have tried to make. I think they had the best of intentions that they could reform the system, but I think they had failed.

I guess we have to have nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to re-educating the American voting public to what political campaigns should be all about. It’s not a beauty contest. It’s not a personality contest. It’s a way of educating every voter, or as many as are still competent to think for themselves, of the importance of the issues and how they should be dealt with and what the alternatives are with different programs. It’s going to be a longer and more difficult and tenuous method than a nice, tidy, little, crisp campaign financed by the big givers.

There have been organizations like Common Cause who have tried to, or at least have talked about doing that. There are some others.

They haven’t gotten the kind of public support, unfortunately. My book, way back in 1998, didn’t fly off the shelves to anybody really or to that many people, even though it was under the auspices of the 20th Century Fund.

I guess we have to steal ourselves to a period when we simply try to re-educate the American voting public to what a campaign should be, what it could be if it were democratically organized with the idea that public discourse and public participation are public functions that should be publicly funded. Eventually, I hope that we could re-educate the public to the fact that there is a better road to travel than the one that we have been on now for so many years.

I can’t hold out the bright promise of the instantaneous conversion of people to this idea. I think it has to be put out there in the public domain. It has to be discussed. People like you have to write about it. It has to be publicized to the point where maybe others will spring up here, there, and everywhere and support the idea that we do something to get rid of the kind of treadmill we are on at the present time.

There are a lot of people saying that the system has gotten so rotten now and unmanageable, both in terms of the calendar and the breaking away of candidates from the system, just raising their own money, that after this campaign, people will say, “We can’t do it this way again.” What do you think the chances are that they’ll say that we can’t do it this way again?

The road to success is a metaphor paved with more than just a few cobblestones to stumble over, thorns to prick tender feet, of those who hold out high hopes that we can have a better educated and more participatory and less heavily monetized kind of electorate that thinks the real test is: “Can you show me your money? If you can, what can you give me in exchange?”

I don’t think there is a short, simple, easy road to travel. I think it will require some patience, some obduracy, some stubbornness on the part of the people to continue to say what I have been saying in enough forums and get enough distribution on a wide enough plane of this idea that elections are public functions that have to be disciplined. I don’t hesitate to use the word, to take a different and quite radically different approach to the way we elect our public officials. First re-educate the public, and then we vote.

What about having a president of the United States, whoever he might be, take a leadership position on this?

Of course that would be enormously helpful if George Bush — elected as unmeritoriously as he was with one vote on the Supreme Court in the year 2000 — had only had the wit and the wisdom or either one to say: “This system is wrong. We’ve got to hear the voice of the American people. We’ve got to do it in a new and entirely different way.” If we ever elect somebody that is willing — if Obama wins, I think he might be educable.

He’s raised more money than anybody in history.

That’s true, but most of it in small amounts. It’s the John Andersons of this world that send in $60 at a time. I don’t think that millions of people giving small amounts are going to have a corrupting influence. When you have just a few thousand people contributing huge amounts, there, I think, is the danger.

To go back to your question, it would take a president who was that visionary that he could ask Congress in maybe his first message to that body: “Listen up fellas and gals. Now that I’m here on the mountaintop, I would like to recommend that we take a totally new look at the way we elect our presidents.” I don’t know whether Obama would listen. I would hope he would, otherwise I’ll ask for my money back. No, I wouldn’t. It would take presidential leadership, a few voices like mine.

If not now, when? When you’ve got the system that exists so totally screwed up and you’ve got people running away from the system that could keep it.

I think the time is now. It is right. Somebody has got to find a way of shouting that from the mountaintop. I guess the only one who could really stand on the mountaintop would be the president himself. I don’t see any amendments to McCain-Feingold. You’ve got to take a totally different approach.