The Sooner the Better
George Will on Howard Dean’s campaign finance:
There may be more moral vanity in Howard Dean than in any politician since Woodrow Wilson, which is why Dean is incapable of admitting that he has ever been wrong or changed his mind (about Medicare cuts, raising the retirement age, NAFTA, basing affirmative action on class rather than race, etc.). So now he says that unless he abandons public financing, his money will be gone when the primaries are over. Then Bush could spend to speak to the nation all summer, while he, Dean, would fall silent until after the Democratic convention, when he would get a fresh infusion of public money.
But notice that Dean’s argument concedes what campaign finance regulators deny — that money is tantamount to speech, and therefore limits on political money limit political speech. Note also that Dean refuses to limit the spending of his privately raised money in the primaries to the amount that his publicly financed rivals will be spending. Obviously his decision to rely on private money is motivated not just by fear of Bush after the primaries but also by his desire to outspend his rivals in primaries.
And there’s not a damn thing wrong with that. Dean should be respected for disdaining Federal matching funds, but should be disdained himself for his moral cowardice in pretending to leave the decision up to his supporters.
As George Soros proves, the Campaign Finance Reform Act is a joke. And as Will notes, it’s in violation of the First Amendment.
Kill it already.
I’m starting to like ol’ Howard. Sure, he’s a cross between Rick Moranis and Jack McFarlane (from Will & Grace), but I’d like to see a few more flakes packed into his snowball before the hell of next year’s election.
I’m all for getting rid of public funding of elections. If you can’t raise the money you need, you probably don’t have enough people believing in you anyways. Check for Dean.
I’m also in favor of anyone who can bust up the Clinton/McAuliffe cabal in the Democrat party. Not that I want to see Dems win, but they’re creating a poisonous political environment and leaving a huge vacuum in the center that the Republicans are leaking into. A sane Democratic party might mean that Republicans can start acting like, you know, conservatives again.
What I’d like to see? Dean wins the nom despite viscious attacks from his own party and causes a schism that destroys the current Dem leadership. He goes on to win 40-45% of the popular vote and 25-30% of the electoral vote avoiding humiliation and convincing the Dems that they can win if they have decent leadership with a positive message.
What Will misses in contrasting Dean to “campaign finance regulators” is that Dean is the king of them all — he focused on the allegedly corrupting influence of money in politics in his 1997 inaugural address as Vermont governor (notwithstanding that in 1994 he raised more money from the pharmaceutical industry alone than his opponent’s entire campaign raised), and pushed through Act 64, the most extreme campaign finance staute in the nation (it was largely struck down by the Vermont district court in 2000 and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002, but the Second Circuit withdrew its opinion in October 2002 and I believe that the litigation is still pending). Act 64′s strict limits on both contributions and spending go way beyond McCain-Feingold. Dean obviously chose to make it look like his supporters were begging him not to abide by public financing because he knows he’s vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy if he does it himself.
i want to see kuchinich win (and get married at the primary ha!), but dean is 2nd
kuchinich would be a 90% and full 50 state
with dean, we still might lose hawaii and ny
what i want from the democrats comes from conan, the barbarian “see my enemies driven before me, hear the lamentations of their women…”