The political conventions of the Republican and Democratic
parties in August
of this year are a perfect case in point. The primary purpose of these
conventions--nominating the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of
each party--has been made irrelevant for at least two decades by the primary
elections held in each state during the winter and spring. They have instead
become "coronations," with the tributes to each party's winner collected in
the form of large cash contributions at large fundraisers held throughout the
week of the convention.
These large cash contributions are, theoretically, illegal under U.S.
campaign finance laws. But a clever loophole in these laws, exploited by both
parties, allows contributors to make the officially regulated "hard money"
contributions (monies that are reported publicly and limited to $2,000 per
election cycle) and "soft money" contributions (monies that are reported
publicly but otherwise unregulated) to each party.
The amount of "soft money" allowed into the political system is staggering.
Published shortly before the beginning of the 2000 campaign, Charles Lewis
and the Center for Public Integrity's book The Buying of the President 2000:
The Authoritative Guide to the Big-Money Interests Behind This Year's
Presidential Candidates is an often shocking read. The introduction to the
book asserts bluntly that "the dirty secret of American presidential politics
is that the nation's wealthiest interests largely determine who will be the
next President of the United States, in the year before the election."
This is an assertion that The Buying of the President 2000 backs up with
numbers and more numbers. One American union gave nearly $3.7 million to the
Democratic Party in the eight years between 1991 and 1999. The Phillip Morris
Company--a massive cigarette and food conglomerate--gave the Republican Party
$6.2 million in the same time period. The book also lists the "top patrons"
of each of the presidential candidates in the 2000 election. Unsurprisingly,
George W. Bush has a slew of large Texas-based businesses and families on his
list. Al Gore's list of patrons includes large investment banks, media and
communication companies and a large accounting and financial services firm.
The large corporate contributions and the subsequent policy decisions that
they inevitably influence are the clearest dilemma posed by the American
system for financing campaigns. But longtime Washington Post reporter
Elizabeth Drew poses even more damning questions in her book, The Corruption
of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why. Drew's hypothesis is that the
crisis of money in America's politics has not only corroded the average
American's trust and interest in government, but that it has broken down the
basic civility that existed between the two main parties within government
institutions. Put simply, Drew maintains that before the advent of "soft
money," elections were always hard fought, but that the results were
respected and the business of government ran more or less smoothly. She
asserts that the race for money in a system with no real restraints has
driven reasonable voices in both parties out of government. "Taken as a
whole," Drew writes, "Members of Congress today are less rounded, less
reflective than before. In part, this is by default, as other people who
might be more thoughtful decide not to run, because of the amount of money
they have to raise, the loss of privacy in the age of more intrusive
reporting, and the quality of their lives if they do get there. Not only has
the rate of retirements from Congress increased but it has become
increasingly difficult for the parties to recruit able candidates to run for
the House or Senate. A man here who has had significant political experience
asked, 'Are we facing, through what's happened to our campaign finance system
and the quality of the candidates, the delegitimization of government?'"
Drew makes her strongest points about the crisis in American government by
comparing the care and thoroughness with which the House of Representatives
deliberated the impeachment of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and the
reckless charge to impeach President Bill Clinton in 1998 and 1999. The
breakdown in government, argues Drew, led to a trivialization of the most
important unchecked power possessed by the Congress— removal of the
President. "In the Nixon case," writes Drew, "the impeachment process was
used as intended, as a means of protecting the country from a President who
was a threat to it— not simply as punishment for bad behavior." Drew
consistently weaves the major thesis of her book into the analysis of the
Clinton impeachment, drawing power for her argument from the farce of the
proceedings which resulted in Clinton's acquittal by a vote of the Senate.
Yet Drew is no partisan herself, and The Corruption of American Politics
paints Clinton as a victim of forces that he himself encouraged and fed in
his 1992 and 1996 campaign fundraising. Clinton's record of raising money for
campaigns not only shattered the restraints still existing in the system, but
opened him to charges of foreign influence (via campaign contributions
funneled through U.S. sources by China) and "selling" the White House by
rewarding contributors with a night in the Lincoln Bedroom.
At one point, Drew quotes one of Clinton's most controversial 1996
fundraisers, Johnny Chung, in his testimony before Congress. "The White House
is like a subway," Chung told a congressional committee. "You have to put in
coins to open the gates."
As The Buying of the American President 2000 and The Corruption of American
Politics point out, the entire American political system requires such coins.
And the American people are poorer for it.
As America's presidential
campaign winds to its conclusion, the image of the