Checkbooks in the Fog

Sacramento is once again trying to lock up the checkbooks that make California legislative campaigns the most expensive in the country.

The locksmith is Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco). If his bill passes, Brown would lose a leadership lever that helps put the power in the phrase powerful Speaker --the ability to accumulate large contributions and parcel them out among the loyal members of his chamber. That has sent the skeptics in Sacramento into fits of smug winks and knowing nudges.

But the Brown proposal is quite faithful to a model law put together by a bipartisan group of academics, political activists, business people, labor leaders and others on the California Commission on Campaign Financing. They spent 18 months looking at the way elections, openly, and votes, more surreptitiously, are bought and paid for. The pattern was so ugly that they buried the natural differences in the way Republicans and Democrats look at political campaigns and endorsed a package that we think may work.

The most controversial part of the proposal calls for some level of public financing, the best estimate being $4 million to $6 million a year. That also is the part that would make limits on campaign spending constitutional. Candidates would be asked to limit spending voluntarily. If one candidate in a race refused to do so, the state would provide funds to his or her opponent to help prevent the opponent from being wildly outspent.

Gov. George Deukmejian has opposed public financing in the past. For the time being he intends neither to support the bill nor to work very hard against it, but if it gets through the Senate and Assembly he is going to have to change his mind or watch what may well be the last best hope for getting campaign spending--and the potential that it poses for corruption--under control.

We know how he feels. We assumed for years that the full disclosure of campaign contributions would in itself encourage moderation on the part of the givers and the grabbers. But the commission report documents to our satisfaction that the public does not much care about campaign contributions.

We have been no better than lukewarm about public financing as a way out of the dilemma. But the commission’s meticulous report persuaded us that some public financing is the only way to limit spending without violating the Constitution. It is not easy reading, but we commend it to the governor. It should shed enough light on a serious problem to penetrate the shroud of fog that clings to Sacramento at this time of year.