Campaign Reform Backers Seek Key Element: Outrage

“Where’s the outrage?” Republican candidate Bob Dole demanded over and over again in the closing days of his presidential campaign, trying to exploit the unfolding campaign finance scandals involving the Clinton administration.

Five months later, amid escalating evidence of questionable fund-raising practices by both parties, that same question obsessed those promoting campaign finance reform as they launched a nationwide drive this week to gather signatures--and grass-roots support--for their uphill quest.

Judging from their maiden efforts in Boston on Tuesday and here on Wednesday, the movement may well follow Dole into political oblivion unless proponents can soon articulate a compelling vision of how the lives of average citizens might improve under a new set of election financing rules.

“People don’t see the connection between campaign finance reform and their lives,” rued former Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), the newly named head of Project Independence, a Common Cause-sponsored drive to gather 1,776,000 signatures in behalf of a campaign finance reform bill offered by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.).

Bradley’s lament was confirmed during numerous interviews here and in Boston--even by citizens predisposed to reform.

A typical comment came from Mike Campbell, a San Francisco Bay-area researcher who paused with his wife outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to observe the Wednesday pep rally promoting campaign finance reform.

“I think something needs to be done because things are getting a little out of control,” Campbell said. But, he said before heading toward the Liberty Bell exhibit, campaign finance reform would “probably not” affect his life.

“No difference,” agreed Jay Steinberg, a Philadelphia resident who stood on the fringe of a spartan crowd of perhaps 100 people--mostly local Common Cause members--while McCain and Feingold touted their quixotic effort to change election laws. “You’ll have the same ol’ people doing the same ol’ things.”

But Bradley, who campaigned in Boston on Tuesday, is trying out a message with a tried-and-true target--people’s pocketbooks. Eradicating special-interest influence would stop the proliferation of tax loopholes, government subsidies and other sweetheart deals for major contributors--thus leading to lower taxes for most citizens, Bradley contended.

People like Campbell and Steinberg, however, were unconvinced by the latest messages being road-tested by reform advocates, whose two-city blitz included several appearances on local television shows and talk radio programs.

“Every time they try to make it better, they make it worse,” Steinberg snapped.

“It’s a hard thing to make that connection,” Feingold acknowledged.

“We’ve got to do a better job,” McCain concluded.

Their movement faces additional hurdles as well, for many citizens this week expressed considerable doubt about whether congressional incumbents would vote to alter a system that generally seems to benefit them. And such doubts, they said, make them less likely to bother joining the reform effort.

“It’s all a diversionary thing--to keep from doing things that really need to be done, like balancing the budget,” a retired woman, 62, who did not want her name used, said in Philadelphia. “Besides, [campaign finance reform] is never going to happen.”

McCain and Feingold professed to be undaunted by such cynicism--or by the meager turnouts this week. A similar noontime event outside Boston’s Faneuil Hall on Tuesday drew an equally thin crowd, also composed mostly of local Common Cause members.

But Ann McBride, the group’s national president, said that the events were not intended to be rallies so much as news conferences designed to gain maximum local news coverage for Project Independence. She added that a series of public events in California is likely soon.

McBride said that 7,500 Common Cause volunteers across the country now are gathering signatures in the petition drive. The group also plans to hire 10 professional organizers to help generate grass-roots support, particularly in regions with members of Congress who may be potential converts to the cause.

To help Project Independence, President Clinton earlier this week issued a statement reiterating his support for the McCain-Feingold bill and urged “all citizens to join this effort.” He said that the proposal “is real, it is fair, it is tough and it will curb the role of big money in our politics.”

The bill would provide some free TV time as well as discounted postal and advertising rates for candidates who voluntarily agree to spending limits. It also would ban contributions by political action committees and abolish “soft money”--the virtually unregulated contributions to the political parties, typically from large corporations and labor unions, that often indirectly aid individual campaigns.

The bill’s foes say that limits on campaign spending would violate the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

At every opportunity, McCain and Feingold are emphasizing their willingness to negotiate so long as their guiding principles--ending soft money and reducing campaign expenditures--are preserved.

“We’re not going to let the perfect get in the way of the good,” McCain said.

In their stops in the two cities they called “cradles” of American democracy, McCain and Feingold encountered some of the roughest going when they appeared on “Howie Carr Live,” a Boston talk show.

Caller after caller seemed more interested in anything but campaign finance reform. One lambasted the media and academia, another urged that senators’ wages be reduced to the average annual salaries in their states.

Such encounters left even some would-be reformers drained. “I think it’s a longshot,” Bradley conceded at one point.