Campaign fund reform deserves another chance

Voters last week elected 34 new state legislators, people who have never held office in Sacramento. You’d like to think some, at least, will show up wide-eyed and idealistic.

But only one thing is certain: Within a short time, each will pick up the business cards dropped off by lobbyists and begin making calls for political money. It’s never too early to start planning the reelection campaign and hitting up special interests to bankroll it.

A line comes to mind from the old Frank Capra movie classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Jimmy Stewart plays naive freshman Sen. Jefferson Smith, who inherits a seasoned, Washington-savvy chief of staff, Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur). Saunders says:

“Look, when I came here, my eyes were big, blue question marks. Now they’re big, green dollar marks.”

So it is also, too often, in California’s Capitol.

There’s a more contemporary classic observation from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who lamented three years ago, before he himself began grabbing roughly $100 million in political donations:

“Special interests have a stranglehold on Sacramento. Here’s how it works: Money comes in, favors go out. The people lose.”

The solution continues to be public financing of campaigns. Either the public buys the politicians or the special interests will. But that cause suffered a severe setback because of the unfortunate offering and lopsided voter rejection last week of a flawed public financing initiative, Proposition 89.

Under the “Clean Money” proposal, state candidates could have received public funds for their campaigns if they agreed to tight spending limits. Candidates running against selffinanced opponents, or attacked by rogue “independent expenditure committees,” could have gotten extra public money.

So far so good. But then the measure went awry. It’s $200-million annual cost would have been borne only by corporations through tax hikes. Worse, corporations would have been crippled in ballot measure fights by limiting their contributions to $10,000.

There was a sooty piece to this Clean Money initiative. The sponsoring California Nurses Assn. was trying to sell it as the remedy to special interest dominance of Sacramento. But the nurses union itself is a special interest. And Prop. 89 would have benefited the union by weakening the insurance industry for the nurses’ expected future battle to pass a universal healthcare initiative.

Whatever merits some might find in the nurses’ attempt to disarm business, the maneuver backfired and quickly torpedoed Prop. 89.

To peddle public financing, the marketing has to be perfect. The supporting coalition must be bipartisan and wide-ranging. And that means any proposal must treat all political players equally and fairly.

“I was concerned about its overreaching,” says Secretary of State-elect Debra Bowen, who endorsed Prop. 89. “If it hadn’t overreached, it could have been a different story.”

Where does the public financing cause go from here?

Not to the Legislature. Lawmakers toyed with a Clean Money bill this year before burying it in a Senate committee chaired by Bowen (D-Marina del Rey). She supported it, but no other committee member did.

Most legislators prefer raising money on their own because that’s how they got elected. They’re comfortable with the system, even if it is inherently corrupt. Now, after the vote of the people on Prop. 89, they can rationalize not even feigning an interest in public financing.

So it’s back to the ballot. Someday.

“We’re going to do a lot of listening and a lot less talking,” says Susan Lerner, executive director of the California Clean Money Campaign. She adds that “obviously we have to go back to the drawing board” to figure out how to pay for financing politicians’ campaigns.

Everyone should chip in.

But the biggest problem will be convincing voters that they should hand tax dollars to politicians to pay for those incessant, negative TV ads.

“The public’s saying, ‘Enough already,’ ” asserts Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies. “People don’t like all these phone calls, all the junk mail. They ask, ‘Does this mean there’ll be more of it? More competition and more candidates running?’ The public is so down on politicians, they don’t want to encourage them.

“If the public felt better about government, public financing would have a chance. Or, if there was a scandal involving the chief executive. It almost takes that before we can get major reform.”

We could try public financing one office at a time. Start with the insurance commissioner. The only deep-pockets donors really interested in that office are the insurers who are regulated by it. The regulated shouldn’t be bankrolling the regulator.

Or begin with secretary of state, which should be a politically neutral office anyway. “I’d be delighted,” Bowen says.

But if there isn’t going to be some public financing system, we ought to erase all the contribution limits that have spawned unaccountable “independent expenditure committees” and money-laundering through political parties. Allow candidates to raise all the money they can from any source, while expediting public disclosure.

“We’ve created so many unintended consequences with past ‘reforms’ that the cure is worse than the disease,” says Democratic consultant Bill Carrick, who favors public financing.

Bowen wants to upgrade the secretary of state’s computer system to make it simpler for the public to find out who’s giving the politicians money.

“It’s easier to do a search on EBay for baseball paraphernalia than to do a search for campaign contributions,” Bowen says. “Our program doesn’t need just a face-lift, it really needs a new structure.”

No public financing? Allow politicians to make one call and raise all the money they need, if they can. Shine a public light on the transaction for voters. And let the officeholders spend the rest of their time doing the public’s business.

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George Skelton writes Mondays and Thursdays. Reach him at george.skelton@latimes.com.