Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 27, 1995 TAG: 9507270042
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It has changed so much since my last campaign for the state Senate a dozen years ago that I hardly recognize the scene. The man now holding that seat, freshman Republican Sen. Brandon Bell of Roanoke County, raised $126,132 through the official report required June 30. Let me admit I was a poor fund-raiser. But this is almost twice the money I raised outside my own pocket during eight elections in essentially the same district between 1967 and 1983.
Bell's opponent, Roanoke City Councilman John Edwards, is being criticized in party circles for a slow start. But the $34,000 he raised through June 30 would have been thought an astonishing achievement as recently as eight years ago.
In contests for three seats in the House of Delegates representing the Roanoke Valley, three Democratic incumbents and their Republican challengers have already raised $278,000, and total spending is likely to exceed a half-million dollars. Excepting only House Majority Leader Dick Cranwell's spending spree of two years ago, that will mean more money spent, even when adjusted for inflation, than was spent on all campaigns for these seats in the Roanoke Valley during the past 24 years! In fairness, many of these were uncontested.
The Roanoke-area races are no exception. In four other closely watched races for the state Senate, candidates had raised $895,000 through June 30. While there will always be a surprise or two in districts where nobody expected it, it is in these four races - plus the contest between Bell and Edwards - that the question of which party controls the Senate for the next four years will be decided.
Total spending in General Assembly races this year will almost certainly exceed $12 million. This is not an absurdly large sum when you consider that those seeking federal office in Virginia last year spent several times this amount. Still, it's a bit hard to see what the special interests that will be picking up most of the tab hope to gain.
Most of the decisions the next assembly will make are preordained by precedent or will be compelled by circumstance. The old consumer lobby that made such a stir in the '70s has lost almost all its bite. Democrats and Republicans will fall all over themselves to do the bidding of corporate interests and honor the new god of economic development.
The big givers in assembly races will be Trigon Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the Virginia Medical PAC, the Virginia Hospital Association, the bankers, Realtors, public utilities and trial lawyers. They will be joined by the Virginia Education Association and various labor unions proclaiming they are not really a special interest at all but public benefactors.
While labor will give almost exclusively to Democrats, and the trial lawyers will strongly favor them, business interests don't care what label a candidate wears so long as he's reliable. They will persist in seeing no connection whatsoever between Cranwell and Clinton. It is their desire to "invest" in likely winners that makes early fund-raising success so important to a candidate.
Various proposals have been advanced to address the perceived problem of special-interest money seeming to dominate our politics. The have hardly performed as advertised.
The grandest experiment was the check-off on the federal income tax to fund presidential campaigns. Now pegged at $3 per taxpayer, it adds nothing to taxes due and doesn't subtract a penny from any refund that may be coming. But only a diminishing minority of our people are prepared to sanction even this modest step of personal participation in the funding of campaigns.
The Virginia experiment of allowing taxpayers to direct as much as $25 of any refund to which they are entitled either to the state Democratic Party or the state Republican Party has met with even less success.
Various studies purport to show that less than 5 percent of voters ever make personal contributions of any size to political candidates or parties. In a big race, contributions of less than $25 - as welcome as they assuredly are as a sign of grass-roots support - will amount to no more than a small fraction of total spending.
A conclusion clearly emerges: As the cost of campaigning has escalated far faster than inflation, the people themselves are saying, "This is a fight that concerns me only incidentally."
While it isn't impossible for a candidate who is being badly outspent to make a winning issue out of his opponent's lavish campaign chest, it's seldom done successfully. My experience has been that voters are more likely to conclude the candidate they hear the most about in paid media must have something going for him, and his poorly funded opponent must be in sad shape for some good reason.
Being outspent in almost every race I entered caused me to give a good deal of thought to the subject of campaign-finance reform. My conclusion is that given our national habits and constitutional protections of free speech, reform has a way of deepening the stain of corruption that always threatens politics. Certainly, the Watergate-inspired "reforms" of 20 years ago seemed to make matters worse.
No matter how hard they search, no way has yet been found for the American people to delegate responsibility for assuring a politics of reasonable sanity and honor. Like it or not, campaign contributions are integral to the exercise of free speech and the protection of what the people making them hold to be legitimate interests. They are not a guarantee of getting all you want, else the salaries of teachers would be twice what they are, but the assurance of a respected place at the negotiating table.
Officeholders in a short-tempered and short-memoried democracy have a lot in common with garbage collectors: It's dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times columnist.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB