Public Financing of Campaigns Is the Right Idea, but Prop. 89 Is Wrong Way to Do It

It’s getting easier and easier to make a case for why the public should finance the election campaigns of state politicians -- even shelling out the big bucks called for under Proposition 89 on the November ballot.

But it’s hard to make a case for all of Prop. 89 because of its anti-business tilt. More about that later.

First the public financing:

Special interests -- who’ve always been the politicians’ principal bankrollers in Sacramento -- simply have too much influence over public policy decisions. To think otherwise is to deny human nature.

Either the public buys the politicians, as I’ve often written, or the special interests will.

Politicians -- indeed, democracy -- cannot survive without money to run election campaigns.

So Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his opponent, Treasurer Phil Angelides, are scrambling to raise money from what best can be described as investors.

While the governor has hundreds of bills stacked on his desk that must be signed or vetoed by Sept. 30, he’s out hustling campaign contributions from special interests that will be affected by his decisions.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Matt David says the governor is not influenced by campaign donations and “makes decisions based on what is in the best interest of Californians.”

That answer has been handed down from governor to governor, but has had record numbers of recitations in the regimes of Schwarzenegger and his predecessor, Gray Davis, both champion money-grubbers.

The Legislature’s equivalent of bill-signing month is August, when hundreds of measures either are passed or killed.

That’s also the peak fund-raising season for lawmakers. Lobbyists representing special interests get squeezed at local bistros about the time that crucial votes are being taken in the Capitol.

As former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown recently told the San Francisco Chronicle, using the colloquial term for lobbyists: Fundraising “events in Sacramento are strictly for the ‘third house.’ They aren’t civilian events. They are events for people who understand why they have to give.”

One widely respected business lobbyist -- who has given millions to legislators on behalf of special interests over the years -- called me recently to say that he’d been converted to a believer in public financing.

George Steffes, who arrived in Sacramento about 40 years ago to lobby the Legislature for Gov. Ronald Reagan, said: “The thing that really changed me was that I grew up in a system where constituents supported the candidate. I was always for private financing because it was a test of whether candidates could get people to follow them. Today, constituents have little to do with the financing of campaigns.

“The upshot is that the average person thinks the government is for sale or for rent. That’s a major reason to try public financing.”

Too many politicians, he added, “are corrupted. You hear ‘em saying one after another, ‘I can take their money and it doesn’t affect my vote.’ And after a while you just want to throw up.”

Steffes said he hadn’t studied Prop. 89, which is sponsored by the California Nurses Assn., and opposed by a rare alliance of big unions and big businesses that fear losing legislative leverage. But, the lobbyist continued, “I’ll probably vote for it just because in California every 20 years or so people vote for some kind of reform that’s not always good -- like term limits didn’t turn out the way many thought -- but it may be the time to try something without paying too much attention to details.

“Something would be better than nothing.”

Regretfully, I’m not quite there yet. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to this extremely complex measure than the “clean money” public financing.

(For full details, read the nonpartisan legislative analyst’s overview in the voter guide to be mailed by the secretary of state in two weeks or available on the website www.ss.ca.gov. In that same pamphlet, read the distortion-filled arguments by sponsors and opponents only at your peril.)

Under the financing provision, state candidates -- for the Legislature up to governor -- could opt to accept public funds for their campaigns if they agreed to very tight spending limits. Candidates running against super-rich, self-financed opponents -- or harassed by “independent expenditure” committees -- could dig deeper into the public till to level the playing field.

Arizona already operates such a system successfully.

California’s system would cost an estimated $200 million a year and be financed by a bump in the tax rates for banks and corporations. And that’s where Prop. 89 starts to raise my eyebrows. If it’s good for the whole state, why only pick on the banks and corporations to pay for it?

But that’s not the worst of it. There’s an agenda here that overreaches beyond public financing: It’s to greatly reduce corporate influence in California politics. And while that might be fine, corporations shouldn’t be whacked any more than labor unions in an initiative that’s principal purpose is to drain special interest money from politics.

It’s reminiscent of what Schwarzenegger, Republicans and the state Chamber of Commerce tried to do, in reverse, last year with Prop. 75: make it more difficult for unions to spend members’ dues on politics.

Prop. 89 primarily targets corporations by limiting their spending in ballot measure campaigns. They’d be capped at $10,000.

This is constitutionally suspect because the Supreme Court has ruled that ballot measures, unlike candidates, cannot be corrupted so contribution limits generally aren’t justified.

More important, such a policy would unfairly inhibit a corporation from defending itself against some rich guy with no spending limit. A corporation could get around the limit by soliciting money from executives and shareholders and funneling it through a “political action committee.” But that’s cumbersome. Unions that are incorporated also would be limited, but they already operate PACs.

Prop. 89 would be the most dramatic step ever, anywhere, in campaign finance reform.

It may be too big a leap -- for voters and the courts.

It reads more like somebody’s wish list than a doable plan.

George Skelton writes Monday and Thursday. Reach him at george.skelton@latimes.com.