
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 28, 1995                   TAG: 9505310015
SECTION: EDITORIALS                    PAGE: G-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CAMPAIGNS, TOO LONG, GET LONGER

IN PARLIAMENTARY democracies such as Canada and Britain, national campaigns take no more than a few weeks. In the United States, presidential campaigns take months upon months - and keep getting longer.

For the 1992 election, then-Gov. Bill Clinton announced his candidacy in October 1991, making for a 13-month journey from Little Rock to Washington. Today, it's even longer: More than 17 months before the 1996 presidential election, all but one of the likely GOP contenders have officially entered the race.

In addition to the wear and tear that intensifies public disaffection from the political system, overlong campaigns lead to policy-making confusion.

The November congressional elections made sharp policy differences between a Democratic president and a newly Republican Congress inevitable. They are also, to a point, useful: Indeed, the sharpness of policy delineations among the major parties in countries like Canada and Britain is one reason that campaigns there can be so short. Such clarity is diminished, though, when individual presidential campaigning occurs simultaneously.

Already, presidential aspirants such as Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm are crafting positions not just according to their views of what's good for the country - or, for that matter, for their party - but also according to their calculations of what's the best strategy for winning the GOP nomination.

Ever-lengthening campaigning is also associated with the fund-raising grubbiness to which the American political system submits its practitioners. Stretching out the campaign means stretching out the time that must be spent by presidential aspirants in begging for bucks instead of attending to public business. The effect on public confidence is corrosive.

In this instance, though, the money quest is as much cause as result of the lengthening campaign. In another illustration of the law of unintended consequences, an otherwise promising reform - shortening the primary season in 1996 by clumping them tighter - is lengthening the overall campaign. That's because so many of those state primaries come so early next winter and spring that candidates felt compelled to start raising money even earlier than before.

Much of the problem could be fixed without abandoning the meat of the reform. All primaries, clustered by region, could be scheduled for four weekends (the regional order could rotate every election cycle) - but in late May and early June, not March.

More generally, presidential campaigns could be shortened with a decrescendo of the din of rattling tin cups. That, however, would require strengthening the rules governing public financing of elections - not jettisoning it, which congressional Republican budgets now propose to do.

Shorter campaigns in places like Canada and Britain stem in part from characteristics of the parliamentary system hard to import into this country. But not entirely. America hurts itself when, instead of closing campaign-reform loopholes and remedying unintended consequences, it simply abandons campaign reform.

by CNB