Los Angeles, Give Yourself Some Credit : Campaign law wasn’t perfect--but what an improvement

Democratic politics is inherently fairer than a totalitarian system, but it is not necessarily cleaner.

Democratic states everywhere have had to amend their systems in response to campaign-financing scandals that threatened to undermine public confidence in the election process--and thus in government itself. Viewed from this global perspective, the City of Los Angeles was right to have launched, as part of its ethics reform three years ago, a campaign financing and spending limitation reform. And for that same reason, it would be wrong to walk away from that system now--simply because it didn’t work perfectly the very first time it was tried.

EUROPE’S EXPERIENCE: Campaign reform is never a simple matter, no matter where it is initiated. But it is always worth trying in a democratic society. West Germany began its effort in 1959, when the leading political parties realized the urgent need to make themselves less dependent on financial contributions by establishing public financing of the all-important party system itself. In 1965 through ’70 several Scandinavian countries followed suit.

In France, scandals in 1990 involving the Socialist Party prompted the establishment of upper limits on both individual and company donations--and the requirement of disclosure of contributions. Spain now insists on detailed audits of political giving, caps on donations and a measure of public financing to reduce corrupt influences. And just recently Belgium passed a law that makes political donations by companies or trade unions illegal, establishes public financing and spending limits for parliamentary candidates and requires disclosure.

Perhaps many in Great Britain today wish that similarly strict rules had been established for its political system. For recently Prime Minister John Major’s government has been rocked by the disclosure of a contribution of nearly $700,000 to the Tory party by a fugitive from British justice--Asil Nadir, a high-flying businessman who jumped bail while awaiting trial on charges of corporate theft. Even that large sum had not been publicly disclosed because such reporting is not now required under British law. When and if the scandal settles down, however, the British Parliament should emulate its European cousins and insist on full disclosure. A London newspaper is now reporting details of a comparably suspicious--and very large--campaign gift by a questionable foreign figure to the British Labor Party.

LOS ANGELES’ EXPERIENCE: This city, thanks to the landmark 1990 reform, is now a bit ahead of the game and should be proud of it. But critics of this reform effort point to the ineffectiveness of the law in the recent mayoral election as a reason for abandoning it. On the contrary, the experience was far more successful than critics grant: For the first time, in fact, City Council races operated under a healthy combination of public financing and spending limits, with the resulting infusion of much-needed new blood into this crucial body.

No doubt the deep-pocketed Richard Riordan complicated the reform, which had not fully anticipated all the problems that would be created by a free-spending multimillionaire candidate. But such problems are not insoluble; indeed, the City Council now ought to hold hearings to determine what specific ways the reform law ought to be amended. It has been suggested, for instance, that certain new restrictions on a millionaire candidate’s money might mitigate the corrosive effect--and still be found not to violate the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling that allows candidates to contribute as much as they want to their own campaigns.

The job now is not to torpedo this worthy effort to make city politics cleaner--but to improve on it. Future generations will be proud of Los Angeles if it sticks with the effort.