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The Longest Campaign — Part Four (cont.)

Perhaps the most vivid examples were the so-called Willie Horton ad against Dukakis in 1988 and the Swift Boat ads against Kerry in 2004. Horton was a convicted killer in Massachusetts who, while on prison furlough during Dukakis’s tenure as governor, raped a woman. The ad, paid for by the National Security PAC, portrayed Dukakis as soft on crime and included a mug shot of Horton. The Swift Boat ad presented veterans alleging that Kerry did not deserve the combat medals he was awarded as skipper of a swift boat in the Vietnam War. In these cases, the formal campaigns—those of George H.W. Bush in 1988 and of his son in 2004—denied responsibility and the ads continued to be aired.

As the parties, corporations, and labor unions tirelessly worked to bring soft money to bear on presidential elections, the concept of “issue advocacy” also emerged. Committees paid for ads professing to push or oppose issues associated with a candidate without expressly calling for people to vote for or against that candidate. The Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo decision had approved using soft money for such advocacy as long as it was devoid of such “magic words” as “vote for” or “vote against.”

The basic matching-funds system that was part of the post-Watergate reforms continued to function through the end of the century. Only one candidate, former Governor John B. Connally of Texas, in 1980, had opted out of the subsidy in order to raise unlimited campaign funds. He collected precisely one delegate to the Republican National Convention for the $12.7 million he spent. The GOP nominee and the eventual winner, Ronald Reagan, was a phenomenal fundraiser, but his campaign accepted matching funds that year and again in 1984 when he ran for reelection. So did winners George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.

Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, came under intense scrutiny for having raised millions in soft money for the Democratic National Committee in 1996 under suspect circumstances. Clinton held events in the White House for political contributors, and Gore made numerous telephone solicitations from there. Allegations of putting the White House up for sale abounded, raising pressures on Congress for tougher campaign-finance legislation.

One result was a bipartisan reform bill aimed at soft money and issue-advocacy ads, sponsored by Senators John McCain of Arizona, a Republican (and now his party’s presumptive nominee for president), and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat. The legislation was sponsored in the House by Representatives Martin Meehan of Massachusetts, a Democrat, and Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a Republican. Over the next five years, various versions received increasing and eventually majority support in both chambers of Congress, but not enough to overcome threatened or real Republican-led filibusters.

All through this period, virtually all presidential candidates relied on the federal subsidy as the mother’s milk that sustained their quest. After John Connally’s feeble go-it-alone try, only Texas multimillionaire Ross Perot in 1992 ran on his own wallet as a general-election candidate. Publishing magnate Malcolm S. “Steve” Forbes did the same in the 1996 Republican primaries, with the same result.

After an initial period of public support for the $1 income-tax checkoff, and a growing number of major and minor candidates qualifying for the federal match, the demand for the matching funds began to outstrip the supply. In 1993, Congress raised the amount to $3, but taxpayer participation continued to slide. At the same time, a proliferation of states holding presidential primaries in the early months of the election-year calendar put increasing pressure on the fund, and especially on the timely distribution of money. Candidates increasingly had to resort to obtaining bank loans against the payouts due them. The system that began as a boon to presidential candidates became a headache, and a drag on their ability to run the best campaigns possible.