Incumbents Getting Hit on All Sides : And in America, need for campaign reform is ever obvious

W hoever they are, they’re doing a terrible job, and I say get rid of them.

Such, approximately, is the mood these days in world politics. In France, Francois Mitterand’s Socialists are on the run; in Britain, the same goes for John Major’s (or Margaret Thatcher’s) Conservatives. George Bush can’t quite shake Pat Buchanan. And Bill Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, has just been nosed out by Jerry Brown in the Connecticut primary. Incumbency is the only apparent link. If you’ve got a job in politics, that’s proof enough these days that you don’t deserve one.

By the same token, of course, if you do deserve one, then it’s time for you to hit the road. That’s what Sen. Warren B. Rudman, New Hampshire Republican, has decided to do. We’re sorry to see him go because we think his kind of focused, intelligent anger may be close to what the voters want.

Here’s a politician who would rather fly home to New Hampshire and catch up on his (120-books-a-year) reading than don black tie for a White House dinner: “To go to a White House dinner and sit next to someone whom I don’t know and who is there because they’re a friend of Mrs. Bush or a famous movie star or someone who gave $8 trillion to the Republican Party is not my idea of fun.”

No one scares Rudman. At the height of the Ollie North craze, he saw fit to remind that consummate actor that the Constitution does not begin “I, the President” but “We, the People.” As vice chairman of the congressional special committee that questioned North, he was one of three Republicans to sign the majority (Democratic) report, calling the minority report “pathetic.”

But Democrats don’t scare him either. Rudman fought against a rush to judgment in the case of the Keating Five, four of whom were Democrats, winning no Republican friends for his caution. At the end of that long investigation, however, it was Rudman, his voice shaking with emotion, who delivered the definitive rebuttal to Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.): “Everybody does not do it!”

What is Rudman’s secret? Just flinty New England authenticity? We don’t think so. Rudman has safeguarded his integrity by refusing to accept money from political action committees. He can afford a long fight to control medical costs because he takes no money from the American Medical Assn. That’s the rest of the Rudman story.

What Jerry Brown, with his $100 cap on contributions, and Rudman touch in the mind of the electorate is a suspicion that will not fade: If you take their money, you’ll do their work.

How much money does it take to buy a politician? Campaign law limits contributions to a candidate but so-called “soft” money given to a party eludes the controls. During January, according to a Common Cause report, the Republican National Committee raised $3,278,702 in soft money, the Democratic National Committee $445,434. Given that disparity, it may come as no surprise that only the Democratic candidates have taken the Common Cause pledge against this kind of money laundering.

But if President Bush can’t hear a message from the likes of Jerry Brown and Common Cause, let him see it in the career of Warren Rudman, one of the two or three most respected Republicans in the Senate and a man now leaving office in despair over the national political paralysis.

Only campaign reform--beginning with the Common Cause pledge--can call us back from the self-defeat of “Whoever they are, get rid of them.”