Ban Political Ads From TV

We elect a new Congress in 1998, and the presidential campaign of 2000 begins in 1999, so it’s 1997 or never for campaign finance reform. The year ahead will be dominated by members of Congress, journalists, politicians and civic leaders, not all of them hypocrites, straining for consensus on how we pay for political campaigns. They will get it wrong.

Hearings will unveil distasteful deeds of some in high places. There may be indictments and trials, scandals, even prison terms. But when it ends, the problem will still be there --because the problem is only superficially about taking money from foreigners or from people who are not very nice. Wherever it comes from, such money does not go to enrich candidates. It goes to get them elected and keep them in office.

We already knew how a new senator must spend part of every day raising money for his reelection, how lobbyists for banks chip in at fund-raisers for members of the banking committee and those for agribusiness shell out for members of the agriculture committee. But 1996 brought home how democracy is undermined by the ballooning cost of getting elected. No one says what donors expect in return, but it must be something.

That is why most talk will center on raising the money: how much, who gives it, in what form. Limits will be proposed on givers, and lobbyists, foreign and domestic, will be denounced. There will be the usual proposals to charge the costs to the public treasury.

All these have been tried before and thwarted, because money also buys ingenuity. After some of Richard M. Nixon’s associates went to prison for raising campaign funds illegally, a new law set new rules. The new rules produced new deceptions, like political action committees and soft money--money given to a party or a cause rather than to a candidate. But soft money can promote a candidate so long as it is technically not his to spend.

None of these so-called reforms has worked. Nothing will work until the talk shifts from how money is raised to how it is spent.

Primarily, it goes for television. In 1996, political campaigns spent more than $2.5 billion on buying TV time, producing commercials to fill it, hiring experts to organize focus groups to determine what those commercials should be about and paying “consultants” to hire the experts to organize the focus groups to tell them what makes commercials work and on through the whole debasing process.

Only banning political advertising from television will work. It would slash the cost of running for office. It would make elected officials less beholden to those “special interests” people are always talking about. It might create a 1st Amendment problem. But the Supreme Court has placed broadcasting outside full 1st Amendment protection. Some of us find its reasoning specious, but this time bad law may make a good case. When the 1st Amendment issue was raised about Congress’ ban on TV cigarette advertising, the ban was sustained. If cigarettes, why not politicians?

Since givers will still have their reasons for giving, the money may keep coming anyway. But where might politicians spend it? On printed advertising? Mailings? Telephone banks? A campaign needs them all, but none has television’s impact, subtlety or potential for abuse.

Consider the recent campaign to succeed New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. New Jersey has no major commercial television station. (WWOR, Channel 9, is physically in Secaucus, but New Jerseyans do not consider it a New Jersey station any more than they consider the Jets or Giants, who play football nearby, New Jersey teams.) Half of New Jersey watches New York stations, half Philadelphia stations. Advertisers pay for those audiences even when the ads address only some of them. So New Jersey commercials must hit hard. Attack ads hit the hardest. The Senate race between Reps. Dick Zimmer and Robert Torricelli made headlines as the year’s meanest. They spent $17.2 million. Would their campaigns have been less “negative” without TV ads? Perhaps. Their worst commercials would have been toothless in print, just as Willie Horton would have fizzled as a full-page ad.

Banning TV political commercials skirts the dilemma that only its beneficiaries can change a political system. This is no such threat; members of Congress dislike fund raising. In their better moments, they consider themselves sentinels of the republic. Nor does ending TV ads reduce the benefits of incumbency. How would politicians spread their legitimate messages without TV commercials? They would surely find a way.