A Rare Moment of Political Unity in Battling Campaign Finance Law

The legal skirmish over Proposition 208, the measure to reform campaign financing that was approved by California voters four years ago but has been tied up in courts ever since, has flared anew in a federal courtroom.

The Democratic and Republican parties are again uniting to argue that the measure’s strict contribution limits would prevent all but wealthy candidates from conveying their political messages to the public.

Government watchdogs are again arguing that the limits would evenly remove the influence of big special interest money from elections, forcing candidates to use more grass-roots approaches to winning votes.

Both sides are counting on big-name witnesses to hammer home their point.

The politicos’ top witness, Garry South, Gov. Gray Davis’ chief campaign advisor, opened the trial Tuesday by declaring that if Proposition 208 had not been set aside by the courts, Davis would never have been elected.

On Friday, campaign contribution advocates plan to strike back with testimony from former Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who won office after effectively campaigning under limits in his home state.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton ruled in 1998 that Proposition 208’s limits--$250 for a legislative race and $500 for a statewide contest--were too low to allow effective political discourse and banned the state from enforcing them. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that preliminary injunction last year and sent the case back to him for a final decision.

The groups aligned against Proposition 208, which include unions and an antiabortion political action committee in addition to the political parties, expect Karlton to make a similar decision at the end of the current trial. But Proposition 208 supporters are optimistic of a different outcome, largely because of a significant recent Supreme Court decision that upheld campaign contribution limits in Missouri.

Whatever happens in this trial may be moot. The Legislature last week placed a measure on the fall ballot that would supplant Proposition 208’s limits with higher caps on contributions.

South, who managed Davis’ 1998 gubernatorial campaign, said that if the courts had not set Proposition 208 aside during the beginning of that year, the Democrat would have stood no chance in his primary battle against multimillionaires Al Checchi and Jane Harman.

Checchi, a former Northwest Airlines chairman who was America’s 113th richest man at the time, spent $40 million on the Democratic primary, breaking the U.S. record for a state race.

Davis, who had no personal wealth to draw from, spent about $9 million on the primary--but faced a “dire” shortage of cash at the end of 1997 and had concluded he had “tapped out” his base of donors.

Despite dialing for dollars up to 12 hours a day, then-Lt. Gov. Davis concluded he could only raise about $1 million more before the primary. After Karlton’s ruling, he raised more than $3 million before the primary vote.

“Gray Davis would not have been able to compete in the primary, would not have won the primary and would not be governor today,” South said, noting that with 27 years in California politics, Davis was “no political neophyte.”

South conceded that every candidate he had ever worked for in three decades of political campaigns spent everything he could raise on the election.

“The purpose of a campaign,” he said, “is to affect the dynamic of an election, not to get someone’s name on the ballot, cross your fingers and pray for something to happen.”

South’s testimony was the first by a series of witnesses bringing home the point that California, due to its size and considerable voter apathy, is an unwieldy beast for political candidates, one that requires extraordinary expenditures of cash to get their message out.

South noted that California’s 15 million registered voters are more people than the entire population of all but a few states. A consultant involved in the only legislative election to take place in 1997 during the brief time Proposition 208 was in effect--the Los Angeles race that resulted in the election of Democratic Assemblyman Gil Cedillo--testified that the measure’s limits hamstrung his client, losing candidate Victoria Castro, from expressing her views.

And a television expert noted that buying air time in the state’s large media markets is a pricey proposition--$290,000 for a state Assembly candidate in San Diego, for example, for a week before this year’s election.

Attorneys defending Proposition 208 had heard it all before. As one noted, while California may have more registered voters than anywhere else, it also has more people to mine for political money.