Campaign Financing Stirs Some Democrats’ Concern About Values

As he closed the debate recently on a losing Democratic effort to defeat the capital gains tax cut favored by President Bush, House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) made a last-ditch plea to his colleagues.

“Do not listen when some contributor, a well-meaning contributor, may call and say please vote for capital gains, it helps my own situation,” said Gephardt. “I know the temptation to do that.”

Gephardt understood the temptation because in the days before the capital gains vote he and other party leaders had listened with some astonishment as Democratic lawmakers told them that they could not oppose the tax cut because it would anger their financial backers.

The attitude of some Democratic lawmakers, said one party leader, was: “I get elected by voters, I get financed by contributors. Voters don’t care about this, contributors do.”

Though a Democratic alternative to the capital gains cut failed for a variety of reasons, the influence of campaign contributors on the vote has accelerated the fears of some Democratic lawmakers that their party’s core values are being subtly undermined by the relentless requirements of financing their campaigns. The growing, and some say pernicious, influence of political money on the Democratic Party, these lawmakers say, makes fundamental campaign finance reform an imperative if the party is to stay true to its principles.

“It’s as simple as he who pays the piper plays the tune,” said Rep. Dan Glickman (D-Kan.). “Money has made it more difficult for Democrats to define an economic agenda that is different from the Republican agenda; we are taking from the same contributors.

“The intellectual viability of our party requires us to extricate ourselves from the campaign finance system we have,” Glickman added. “If there is no difference between the two parties, voters will say, ‘Let’s go for the real thing.’ . . . Harry Truman said if you run a Republican against a Republican, a Republican always wins.”

As they ponder what is becoming of their party, some House Democrats say they have become the victims of their own success. As the 1980s draw to a close, Democrats are reaping the harvest of what they sowed at the beginning of the decade when fears of a Republican takeover of the House prompted them to reinvigorate their fund-raising apparatus.

Under the leadership of former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced), the aggressive head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democrats sent the fund-raising community, particularly business-oriented political action committees, a blunt and effective message. “Coelho warned them that we control the gavel,” said one Democrat. “All of a sudden we started getting more money.”

The message sank in to the point that, in 1988, House Democratic incumbents were getting 52% of their funds from PACs, compared to 38% six years earlier. The dependence of Republican incumbents on PACs rose far less during the same period, from 35 to 40%.

Over the past decade, several other trends have emerged in the world of House campaign finance. Campaigns have become far more expensive; candidates are increasingly dependent on PAC contributions; the fund-raising advantage enjoyed by incumbents has widened, and incumbents are increasingly immune to challenge.

Thus, between 1978 and 1988, according to figures compiled by Common Cause: Contributions received by House general election candidates increased from $92.2 million to $242.6 million, or more than 2 1/2 times. Contributions from all PACs--business, labor and others--grew more than fourfold, from $22.9 million to $98.9 million. PAC contributions now account for 45% of the average House candidate’s campaign war chest, compared to 28% 10 years ago. House incumbents in 1988 raised more than seven times as much as challengers from PACs, on average receiving just over $200,000 apiece from PACs.

Though many House Democrats are reluctant to say publicly that the soaring demands of raising funds and their increasing reliance on moneyed interests have a direct influence on the legislative product, in private some say there is a very real link.

“More and more on the floor I hear people say, ‘I can’t help you, I’ve gotten $5,000 from this group,’ ” said one Democrat from the West.

“It’s the culmination of money and politics,” said a California Democrat after the capital gains defeat. “We’ve been out rubbing shoulders and taking money from these people and there is no countervailing force.”

Some Democrats who voted for the capital gains tax cut rejected that view, saying that capital gains is neither a class nor a party issue. “It’s a Main Street issue,” said Rep. Ben Jones (D-Ga.). “The people I was hearing from were not from the country club, they were from the barber shops.”

And Coelho, the architect of his party’s success in courting campaign money from business interests, insisted that the downside for Democrats is not “selling out to X individual interest, but in eating away time” members can devote to their legislative work.

Coelho sees no erosion of party values as the result of his handiwork. “The people I tried to get with business PACs were already voting that way,” said Coelho, who resigned from Congress in the midst of a controversy over a junk bond purchase he made and is now working as an investment banker. “My argument was, if this guy is voting your way, don’t work against him.”

But some of Coelho’s former colleagues and outside critics of the system take a less benign view.

“You have an institution that responds to money,” argued Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause.