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The Longest Campaign — Part Five (cont.)

Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan reform group, nevertheless heralded the passage of the McCain-Feingold law as a major step in ending “the corruptive nexus between huge unlimited contributions and federal officeholders.” But far from fears “that the sky was falling and the political parties would be destroyed if this money disappeared,” he says, “the fact of the matter is the political parties have done fine. They have raised record amounts of hard money. They haven‘t suffered.”

What about the criticism that there’s still too much money in presidential politics? “This law was never about the total amount of money spent in politics—that wasn’t the issue,” Wertheimer says. “The issue was the kind of money that was going to the political parties and being raised by federal officeholders.” What the law did in attacking huge soft-money contributions, he noted, was to oblige the parties “to go back out to citizens around the country, back out to the grass-roots fundraising and to a broader base of small donors. That’s healthy for the parties, and it’s healthy for the country.”

As for limiting the total amount of money in politics, Wertheimer says, “you need to deal with the system for financing congressional races, and you need to deal with fixing the presidential public financing system.” But driving money out, he says, was never the stated goal of campaign-finance reform. “The stated goal had to do with dealing with a serious corruption problem, one that Congress had found to exist and passed laws to address it. The Supreme Court found that the case [that money was a potentially corruptive element in politics] had been made and upheld [McCain-Feingold’s] constitutionality. That’s what it was about.”

When President Bush ran for reelection in 2004 he again rejected the federal subsidy for the primaries, which would have been less than $20 million, and raised an astounding $269 million. The leading Democratic candidates aspiring to oppose him in the general election, former Governor Howard Dean of Vermont and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, followed suit, knowing that the nominee would have to keep pace with Bush during the long run-up to the Democratic National Convention, when primary money could still be spent. Dean’s campaign imploded despite the $51 million he raised, and Kerry raised $234 million in winning his party’s nomination. Both he and Bush accepted the federal subsidy for the general election campaign, Kerry losing in November.

Until this astounding money race, the basic public-financing scheme set in place in the post-Watergate reforms had essentially worked. In 1986, a bipartisan commission co-chaired by former Democratic National Chairman Robert S. Strauss and former Nixon Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird reported that “public financing of presidential elections has clearly proved its worth in opening up the process, reducing the influence of individuals and groups, and virtually ending corruption in presidential election finance.” But the failure to increase the levels of allowable contributions to deal with the rising costs of campaigns and an accelerated election process finally persuaded leading candidates to break from the fundraising limits. And bundling made it possible for them to raise such vast amounts that the federal subsidies they turned away seemed like small potatoes. The sky’s-the-limit strategy seems to have become the only way to survive and compete, although raising a large number of small donations on the Internet has boosted the campaigns of Howard Dean in 2004 and both Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Ron Paul in 2008.

If there is any prospect of deliverance from the wretched excess of money in presidential politics, it’s not likely to come before the 2012 election cycle, as the leading candidates in both parties this time around take pages from the hugely successful fundraising techniques and apparatus of George W. Bush in 2000, and his copycats in the Democratic Party in 2004, to raise ever higher the price tag attached to the buying of the president.