Turned Off by Politics? There’s a Way Out of the Swamp : The vital importance of campaign-financing reforms like Proposition 131

Sherlock Holmes once assured Dr. Watson that while it may be impossible to predict the behavior of one person, predicting how an entire group will behave is a cinch.

American politics makes a good example. It is seldom possible outside a courtroom to say with certainty that a given politician is corrupt. It is also impossible to deny that the system itself has been so sufficiently corrupted that its very credibility is in doubt.

The great corrupter is lust for money. The most effective cure at hand is campaign-finance reform, something that must start at the grass roots. California can do just that by approving Proposition 131 on the state ballot Tuesday.

Why not start reform at the top? Look to Washington. The most shocking financial scandal in American political history--the savings and loan disaster that will cost taxpayers at least $500 billion--is still growing and implicating members of Congress. But even scandal on that scale has not shamed Congress into reforms that would make its members stop raking in whatever amount of money they take from whatever source to be reelected.

For one example of the grotesque distortions produced by the present system of financing elections, consider United States senators. They are generally what they seem to be--powerful men--or, in two cases, women--with powerful friends, some so expert in defense, agriculture, taxes or other matters that they can stare down the President on an issue. They are not the sort you would expect to hear begging a colleague not to force him to vote against a bill his contributors want with the phrase: “Please don’t hurt me on this bill.”

But powerful men pleading not to be hurt is a common sight these days as senators become the nation’s most vulnerable legislators and money their only real defense against defeat. Translated, it means: “Please don’t force me to make a choice in public between my contributors and my constituents.”

This happens increasingly because interest groups are able to rent--not buy, but rent--entire blocs of votes with contributions of cash that legislators need, or think they need, to stay in office. Thus, debates often are carried on not so much among senators as among competing corporate interests, with voters allowed to speak only when they are spoken to.

Senators are most vulnerable because they have trouble turning entire states into safe districts the way that all but a handful of members of the House of Representatives can.

THE CRAVING FOR CASH:

But the insatiable appetites of senators for cash are not unique. They are reflected all down the political line to the most modest city hall. The main difference is in the amount it takes to satisfy the craving.

A classic example of that was cited in a study of local elections published last year by the California Commission on Campaign Financing. Candidates for council in Pasadena, known as the Board of Directors, ran at-large in the city until 1983, when it was divided into seven districts. That should have allowed candidates to reach all the voters they needed to reach with just one-seventh the amount of money they once had to spend. But two years later, candidates spent nearly 14 times as much money campaigning in small districts as they did in 1979 when they ran at-large.

The California Commission, whose businessmen, lawyers, academics and reform-minded politicians have stuck with a largely thankless task for several years, has examined only the state political system. But the flaws it finds can be found not only in most other states but in Washington, D.C., as well. And its proposed reforms would work as well on the East Coast as on the West.

PERPETUAL PANHANDLERS:

Virtually the entire present system of political finance is corrupting to some degree, but the most grievous damage is done by the fact that politicians can, and do, raise money every day of every year, not just when they need to pay the costs of a campaign for reelection. Outsiders hoping to mount a challenge that will get them inside government can raise money the same way, but pickings for challengers are usually slim. The odds favor incumbents so heavily that giving money to challengers is often like throwing it out a car window.

The California Commission found that incumbents raised 60% of their campaign funds in off-years; challengers raised only 1%.

Times writers Sara Fritz and Dwight Morris, in last week’s series of reports on campaign finances, found a similar pattern on Capitol Hill. One result of the politics of perpetual panhandling is that it allows elected officials to act less as public servants than as entrepreneurs whose business is politics rather than flowers, fast food, bicycles or coffee and Danish.

Reps. Henry A Waxman, Mel Levine and Howard L. Berman, all Los Angeles Democrats, meet regularly in Waxman’s office to make lists of colleagues whose gratitude they can guarantee by sharing campaign funds they do not need in their own safe districts. Anti-trust laws prohibit such behavior among corporations. For anyone else, it might be classified as vote-buying. The Californians defend the process as a way to promote liberal thought in American politics. The same pattern shows up in conservative circles, yet another instance where the claim that everybody is doing it does not make the practice right.

Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), for example, has a fund-raising operation on the side that solicits money from a customized mailing list of conservative contributors. As a sideline to his sideline, he rents the names on his list to like-minded patriots who need to expand their own mail solicitation operations.

NON-CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS:

The California Commission on Finance Reform said 86% of the money collected by politicians in off-years came from political committees, business interests or labor unions, none of which confuses politics with charity.

According to Fritz and Morris, the off-year collections are used to buy fancy automobiles for members of Congress; throw $100,000 barbecues in Texas; send retiring representatives to pasture with $500,000 nest eggs of unused campaign funds, and even to buy airline tickets for official trips, because it is easier than filling out government forms to justify the expenses.

Some politicians say the gigantic increases in campaign contributions reflect no more than inflated costs of campaigning. Both the Fritz-Morris series and the California Commission report document that as nonsense.

For example, direct-mail spending by state legislative candidates went up 155% between 1978 and 1982 to reach voters whose numbers increased only 12%. The increase obviously had less to do with inflation than with campaign technique. In fact, postage costs actually fell.

The same pattern turns up in national campaigns. The average House candidate spends only 13% of a campaign budget on television.

Where does the rest of the money go? What Fritz and Morris found in their computer-assisted search was that big chunks are spent raising even more money, or keeping political staffs busy between elections doing favors for VIP constituents or getting the congressman’s name in the papers. It is spent, in short, to support mini-political machines devoted to a single candidate, much the way New York’s Tammany Hall used to operate to support an entire Democratic Party.

Proposition 131 would not clean up all of American politics, but it is a place to start. Because it sets term limits, candidates would be less likely to think of politics as a form of going into business on their own. It would stop year-round fund-raising, put a limit on how much big contributors could give and add public funds to private funds to encourage candidates to put a ceiling on expenses.

One specious argument often used against public financing is that it would add to the financial advantage of incumbents over challengers. The reverse is true. If an incumbent tried to swamp a challenger with big spending, public funds would allow a challenger to keep his or her head above water. Another argument is that an incumbent has so many advantages against a challenger that a level campaign-spending playing field in fact tilts to the incumbent, who is unlikely to be ousted unless a challenger can thoroughly outspend him. There is some truth to this observation, and in fact public financing does not guarantee a level playing field. But it does give a challenger a better chance--and it removes special-interest giving from the financing.

There are many different systems of campaign financing; the one offered in Proposition 131 is just one way to go. But it is clearly a step in the right direction. A yes vote on Proposition 131 may be the most important vote on the huge state ballot Tuesday, because saving politics from itself has to start here and start now.