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“The Longest Campaign” — Podcast |

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In this election, the candidates for president will spend more than $1 billion for the first time. That’s just one sign that the campaign-finance system put in place after Watergate is not working the way it should. Over the next few months, the Center for Public Integrity’s “Buying of the President 2008” project will examine the influence of money on the presidential race. The first part in our series is “The Longest Campaign,” a history of big money in presidential politics.

The last big breakthrough in campaign-finance reform started in 1972, months before the Watergate break-in. Then-President Richard Nixon signed a bill meant to staunch the flow of money in politics. Even the above-board contributions to his own campaign were raising eyebrows.

Jules Witcover: The big scandal, if you want to call it a scandal, was that one person, an insurance executive in Chicago named W. Clement Stone, raised $4 million for the Nixon campaign. That was considered outrageous.

Journalist Jules Witcover writes about the history of campaign finance for the Center. Witcover says there’s no evidence that Stone got anything for his money. It was the idea that one person could contribute so much money to a politician that sparked thoughts of reform. Watergate gave those ideas real momentum.

Witcover: There was such a revulsion against Nixon and against his administration that reformers got hold of that and were able to build a case to put a limit on how much candidates spend, hoping that it could be controlled.

Campaign-finance reform is a story of hard-fought battles for laws that are only temporary dams against a flood of money. The reform bill that passed after Watergate, the Federal Election Campaign Act, made several innovations. It created the Federal Election Commission to oversee elections. It limited expenditures by independent groups, and it put in place a system for public financing of presidential campaigns. By checking off a box on the IRS form, citizens could direct $1 of their taxes to subsidize elections.

Witcover: In order to be eligible for the subsidy, candidates had to agree to the limits, and that was going to be a way to keep spending down. It worked pretty effectively from the very beginning in the mid-’70s until the 2000 election.

In the last decade, there have been two major cracks in the campaign-finance dam. One is George W. Bush’s “bundling” technique. In the 2000 race, candidate Bush had well-connected Republicans ask hundreds of their friends to donate the maximum to his campaign. He raised enough to skip public money.

The second crack is the record-breaking fundraising of independent groups. The 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, known as the McCain-Feingold act, was meant to plug that leak. Fred Wertheimer is the founder of Democracy 21, a nonprofit dedicated to campaign-finance reform. He says it worked, in part.

Fred Wertheimer: McCain-Feingold accomplished its goals. The purpose of it was to prevent federal officeholders and political party officials from raising huge, corrupting, unlimited contributions to use for their campaigns, through the political parties, from corporations, labor unions, and wealthy individuals who were interested in government decisions. And those contributions are gone from the system, so that the corruptive nexus between huge unlimited contributions and federal officeholders has been cut off.

But, Wertheimer says, McCain-Feingold is also responsible for the growth of 527 groups, independent committees like MoveOn or Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Altogether, 527 groups spent millions of dollars on the election in 2004, and have set even more ambitious goals for this cycle.

Jules Witcover: Now the question is: is there any way at all to salvage this system? Most of the people who I’ve talked to say they don’t think so.

Although some lawmakers are pushing for further reforms to the campaign-finance system, none of those changes will take effect until after the billion-dollar-plus 2008 election.