Dean is betting on sealing up the nomination early, some say. Kerry wants to squeeze wife’s Teresa Heinz’s ketchup-cash stash, others speculate.
But the candidates’ decisions raise an alarming set of questions about the future of public campaign funding itself. Campaign funding is less sexy than campaign strategy but perhaps more consequential. Dean, a past supporter of subsidized financing for electoral campaigns, claims he has no choice but to opt out of the system in order to stay competitive with President George W. Bush. Kerry makes a similar hands-tied defense: he has to skip federal money so he can challenge Dean. Bush, meanwhile, has long since indicated he’ll forego public funding in the primary season in the hopes of raising $170 million in campaign cash. Altogether, the primary plans of three of the highest-profile 2004 presidential candidates don’t include a dime of taxpayer money. Respectable opinion increasingly suggests that to win a presidential nomination, candidates must leave the public-finance system behind.
Even some of the most vocal advocates for publicly financed campaigns don’t deny that the system needs fixing. Chellie Pingree, president of the influential watchdog group Common Cause, says she doesn’t blame Dean and Kerry for their decisions. Pingree admits that in today’s big-spender campaigns, the limitations put on candidates who accept public funds can make candidates feel boxed-in. But in an interview with NEWSWEEK’s Jonathan Darman, Pingree said the solution isn’t to abandon the public-finance system altogether, as some have suggested, but to adapt the existing system to meet the realities of today’s campaigns. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What went through your head when first Howard Dean and then John Kerry decided to opt out of public financing in their primary campaigns?
Chellie Pingree: Well, unfortunately we’ve been anticipating for a while that candidates may choose to opt out, really driven by two things. Significant changes in the way we campaign and the lack of updating in the presidential financing system. I think the fact that candidates who believe in the system are choosing to opt out shows that we’ve really reached a crisis point in the mechanism, the ways this whole system works. And the second part is the unprecedented fund-raising on the part of the president, who is unopposed in a primary but planning to raise $170 million, so [it] puts any opponent at a disadvantage if they just play under the limits … We’ve been believing, along with a lot of other reform groups, that the system needs significant changing, and I think the candidates opting out only reinforces that.
But just days before Dean and Kerry announced their intentions, they signed a pledge to your group committing themselves to public funding reform. Did you feel at all betrayed?
Oh, no. I think we anticipated that there was a good chance candidates were going to opt out, and that’s why we wrote a pledge really defining it more on committing them to fixing the system rather than participating in the system. We made a conscious decision in the pledge not to say, “We expect you to participate….”
So you think that Kerry and Dean can still legitimately claim to be friends of campaign reform?
Oh, absolutely … I think both of them have been committed. Senator Kerry has signed onto campaign-finance reform legislation before Congress and Governor Dean put forward a pretty significant proposal for a wide variety of reforms from [Federal Election Commission] reforms to redistricting. So I think their commitment is quite strong.
Both of these candidates have explained their decisions to opt out of the system on pragmatic grounds: Dean said he was going to skip public financing so he could be competitive with President Bush and then Kerry said he was going to do it so he could be competitive with Dean. Doesn’t that make them look hypocritical on this issue?
It would if they backed down on their pledge to actually fix the system when the bill comes before Congress, I mean, then that would be a huge betrayal and would make them very dishonest. But I think the reverse of that is, if you want to be practical as a reform group, you can’t ask candidates to do things that specifically impede their ability to win an election. We all agree in the reform community that this legislation needs significant reform and there’s been too much foot-dragging on the part of Congress to do that. So at some point, if you start to ask candidates [to do things] that disadvantage them, I think you’re hurting the case for reform because you, in a sense, would be unrealistic about what it actually takes to run an election campaign.
Does that mean that candidates who do stay within the system are actually facing an impediment?
Well, there are stories in every election cycle of people who find a variety of ways to win without the financial resources that people would have expected you had to have … And for some of the candidates it will enhance the amount of money they’re able to spend only because their campaigns haven’t raised that much money or been in contact with as many small donors as, for instance, Governor Dean’s campaign has managed to energize.
So public financing as it operates right now is effective only for second-tier candidates?
Well, it won’t be in the general election. So I would be very wary of anyone using this as a way to discredit the idea of public financing.
But some people are making just that argument; that the whole notion of a publicly funded campaign is a Watergate-era relic that should be abandoned in today’s campaigns.
I would vehemently disagree. I think it’s unfortunately shown the reluctance of Congress to update the system to the reality of modern campaigns. You know the system hasn’t been significantly changed since the Watergate era when it was sort of the precursor to all public financing. Yet, you look at some states like Maine and Arizona or other states that have tackled judicial financing, the mechanism by which they operate is different, only because we’ve learned a lot about campaigning. It’s a different era … So I think it doesn’t at all suggest that we should abandon public financing, I think it means Congress ought to take a serious look at how to update it so it should function properly.
How much has the president’s fund-raising approach in the last two election cycles changed the game?
I think it’s partly increased the cynicism because the president did opt out and was able to raise so much money and then I think, in his case, people have been concerned about the connections between all of that fund-raising and the access and opportunities it brought for the donors … This administration being so closely tied to a lot of big-money interests, corporations, interests in all kinds of sectors like pharmaceutical or energy, all the things that we are now seeing him have on his agenda and moving through Congress, I think that’s the danger–people can now draw the connection here. And that’s the whole point of public financing, to break those ties, to decrease the access and decrease the opportunities for a donor to get something in return for contributing large amounts of money.
What, in your view, would meaningful reform look like?
Well, the four parts of the pledge are the easiest way to understand it, and this is what the candidates signed onto. One, there would more funds, the dollar amounts don’t seem to be high enough. The public funding has to be available earlier in the election season. There needs to be some sort of match when participating candidates are way outspent by their opponents so that you attempt to keep the playing field level, and that’s usually a premise of most public-finance systems. And the last part is to require a candidate in both the primary and the general election.
Are personal, private donations a legitimate way of participating in the democratic process? Are there examples, in your view, of a system that relies on private donations that doesn’t favor special interests?
Yeah, a lot of people have looked at the New York City system for city council elections. That’s a system that rewards small donors, and I think that’s part of what you want to do–you want to reward the idea that small donors can make a contribution, and it can make a difference, and then you match it with public funds so that it enhances it and makes the candidate viable. That’s a really important premise, the idea that everyone’s contribution can make a difference, and it’s part of how Howard Dean has been so successful in fund-raising, and, to a certain extent, maybe Wes Clark, this idea of … a $25 contribution making you a part of it is important.
Is campaign-finance reform an issue that voters care about?
Well, I don’t think anyone wakes up in the morning and says, “Oh, my God, we’ve got to do something about the campaign-finance system.” … But I do think a lot of citizens wake up in the morning and say, “Why is it I can’t afford the cost of my prescription medication? Maybe it’s because the big pharmaceuticals own the politicians. Why is there a blackout in my community? Why is my kid’s college tuition going through the roof?” People do draw the connection … you just have to connect the dots.
Are candidates ever going to be able to do that in a single sound bite?
I think they do it all the time … Some of them, when they’re making a speech about it, do very well at making the connection of this is why we have to change our system of campaign financing. I don’t think it’s No. 1 on most candidates’ agenda in terms of the thing they talk about, but if you go to the places where there has been successful campaign reform … most of them will say, it makes a huge difference. They’re not constantly asking special interests for money, the people who come before them have no financial interest in their future campaigns and they’re allowed to spend more time legislating and governing.
How optimistic are you that the kind of reform you’re talking about will happen in the near future?
I think that Congress will fix the system before the ‘08 election.
Regardless of who’s in the White House?
I do, I think they’ll fix it by ‘08, and I think part of it will be pushed by the unprecedented amount of money that will be raised and spent in this election cycle.
