LITTLE ROCK — MIKE HUCKABEE'S candidacy for president is looking better every day. He's got some good ideas and maybe a bad one or two, but enough sparkle, humor, humanity and sheer showmanship to make most of the other candidates look robotic as they plod through their Talking Points. The Huck would surely be a top-tier contender for the Republican nomination but for one minor detail: He. Can't. Raise. Money.
And that's what really matters in presidential campaigns, right? Big steaming piles of moolah, collected by who-knowswhom using whatever corporate fronts,political action committees, bundlers, third parties, and tax loopholes the best lawheads can devise. The votes and the actual election? Don't be quaint. As any cynic will tell you, politics is all a matter of how much money you raise and spend, not how well the candidate campaigns.
As of last week, Mike Huckabee's campaign had $651,300 on hand. That compares with John McCain's $1.7 million, Rudy Giuliani's $11.6 million, and Mitt Romney's $9.2 million. And it explains why a voter stood up at a campaign stop last week and asked Mr. Huckabee a darn good question: Why should anybody vote for a guy who may look great in person but can't afford the airtime needed to reach voters in California or Florida?
How did The Huck respond? In typical, Huckish fashion. That is, thin-skinned defensiveness. Or so it appeared, but only at first. Mike Huckabee didn't defend his fundraising so much as attack everybody else's. The whole system of campaign donations is screwy, he contended, and who could disagree? The former governor of Arkansas went on to propose (a) ending all limits on individual contributions, and (b) requiring that candidates report all their contributions immediately. Wow.There's a concept or two. To use his typical, soundbite-friendly language, Mike Huckabee believes the rules on giving to political campaigns should be reduced to: "nothing prohibited, everything disclosed."
End contribution limits? Heresy! The wisdom of limiting campaign contributions has become the great unexamined assumption of our times. How dare The Huck challenge the most conventional wisdom in politics? We all know the purpose of limiting individual contributions: So some fat-cat donor can't simply buy an election. Picture a George Soros type dropping a billion dollars on a candidate of his own design/training. That'd buy a lot of commercials. So why not limit the Big Spenders so they don't have any more influence than the little guy?
Because in the world of Big Money Politics, circa 2007, there are lots of ways to buy influence besides writing checks to the candidates. See the expanding universe of 527 groups-named after the number of the loophole in the Internal Revenue Code that inspired them. There are also the political action committees,the world of Soft Money, and the antics of donation bundlers like the mysterious Norman Hsu, who was one heck of a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton until the law finally caught up with him. And those are just the scams we know about.
Every election seems to uncover some new, perfectly legal but altogether shady way for candidates to raise cash. Which makes you wonder if limits on personal donations don't so much curb the influence of money in politics as cloak it. Here's the big problem with the multiplicity of front groups for political donors: They make it almost impossibleto answer a most basic question in presidential campaigns: Who's giving to whom?
There's another problem with the current system: It does nothing to limit the super-rich from giving as much as they wish to their own political campaigns. At last count, Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate has "lent" his own campaign $17.4 million. Advantage to Moneybags Mitt? Not necessarily. Selffunded pols tend to perform poorly in national politics. Ross Perot ran third behind Bill Clinton and George H W. Bush. And how many folks will remember that Steve Forbes ran for president?
It's the other half of Mike Huckabee's argument that appeals most, at least to those of us in the press: Transparency. Let the voters know who is giving exactly how much and exactly to whom. Immediately. To expand on Mr. Huckabee's idea, why not adopt two simple requirements:
(1) Campaigns must report their contributions at the end of each day. Forget waiting three months for the reports to show up as a public record. Let's get the information every 24 hours. When Richie Rich steps in a with a huge donation, the world-and more specifically the electorate-should know about it. At the time.
(2) End the now entrenched system of PACs, 527s, and front groups that channel money to the candidates in as cloudy a way as the law allows. Let folks give as much as they want, but insist on clear accountability: Each donor has to put his name behind every buck. No shams, no committees-just a donor's name and address.
This latest brainstorm from The Huck may sound like the complaint of a cashless candidate. But that doesn't make it any less attractive. So don't let the cynics fool you-money isn't everything in politics. Not yet. Candidates still have to do things the old-fashioned, democractic way: Run a good campaign, appeal to the voters, and get the most votes. Mike Huckabee may be on to something. Big money isn't the great danger of democratic politics. It's secrecy. The American voter may not be for sale after all.
If The Huck's campaign continues to pick up speed and he outshines his bigmoney competition, he might prove to be Exhibit A in the case for real campaign finance reform, not the simulacrum of it too many of us have been sold.
Editorial, Pages 22 on 10/26/2007