Money is the lifeblood of any political campaign.
Newt Gingrich's loss in Florida is partly due to his being more seriously flawed than Mitt Romney, but it's mostly due to his being overwhelmed by a tsunami of cash spent to drown out his ads.
Romney's Restore our Future SuperPAC spent upward of $15 million, almost all of which went into negative ads. Gingrich's SuperPAC, "Winning our future," had only $5 million with which to attack Romney. The results were reversed in South Carolina, where Romney's surrogates outspent Gingrich's by a mere $1 million. A candidate's ability to raise large amounts of money matters much more than his or her positions on the issues.
At one time, federal campaign laws helped keep the lid on campaign spending. Between 1905 and 1966, several laws were passed to limit the disproportionate influence of wealthy individuals and special interest groups on the outcomes of federal elections, to regulate campaign spending and to mandate public disclosure of campaign finances. These were consolidated into the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act.
After the outrages of the 1972 Nixon re-election campaign, Congress amended FECA to rein in spending by Political Action Committees. Supreme Court rulings and the difficulty of enforcing FECA led to passage of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002. That bipartisan effort attempted to control the abuses of soft money and so-called issue-ads.
The Federal Elections Commission used McCain-Feingold to fine several organizations for their excesses, including both the Swift Boaters for "truth" and MoveOn.org.
But in 2010, a contentious and divided Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United against the FEC. By a 5-4 vote, it vacated previous Supreme Court decisions and overturned established state and federal laws banning corporations from contributing to election campaigns. In effect, the court made legal many of the actions that forced Nixon from office.
The ruling allows unlimited campaign contributions from any source, notably corporations, which had previously been banned from direct contributions to a candidate. The immediate effect was to increase the influence of big contributors, as demonstrated in South Carolina last month.
Since the start of this year, billionaire Nevada casino owner Sheldon Adelson donated more that $10 million to Gingrich's SuperPAC (you or I couldn't earn that much, even working for 200 years). Gingrich used that money to buy air time in the last week before the primary, all of it on negative ads. The mega-wealthy can't buy votes, but they can buy spots on TV, radio, newspapers and increasingly on social media and the Web, to the same effect.
Perhaps Adelson really believes that Gingrich is the best-qualified Republican candidate, but do you think that a President Gingrich could ever turn down an Adelson request for, let's suppose, easing restrictions on internet gambling? Money gets more than access. It buys influence, and $10 million can be very persuasive.
Rather than making elections freer and more representative, the Citizens United decision forces all candidates from both parties to rely on Super PACs. This year, presidential candidates will spend about $3 billion to get elected. To raise that much, every candidate will have to go begging for money from the day they take office. We will see nonstop fund-raising.
Between dialing for dollars and "approving these messages," how will they find time to do what we elected them to do in the first place? And who will our elected officials really answer to - the people, or campaign contributors?
Ever heard of Buddy Roemer? He's running for the Republican presidential nomination. He has a lot of very good ideas, but you'll never hear about him. He doesn't accept donations larger than $100, to emphasize that he is not beholden to special interests. Not surprisingly, Roemer's campaign went nowhere at all. Money is the lifeblood of any political campaign.
Campaign financing is a slimy mess. I will vote for the first candidate to promise meaningful campaign finance reform.
