ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 1, 1996 TAG: 9602010088
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
MORE TRUTH in political campaigns is a very worthy aspiration. Governmental monitoring of political speech isn't the way to attain it.
Establishing Fair Campaign Practices Commissions is one of several suggestions floating around the 1996 Virginia General Assembly, following legislative elections last fall that too often reflected the dumbing-down of political tactics and rhetoric.
Some of those suggestions seem innocuous if ineffectual, like extending from 40 feet to 200 feet the distance that candidates' placard-bearing and brochure-distributing supporters must stay from the polls. The idea of local-government commissions to track political speech, then denounce falsehoods as they arise, might prove similarly ineffectual - but, in its potential anyway, is far from innocuous.
Proponents want to start by reviving the fair-campaign commission in Fairfax County, as a model for the rest of the state. But the Fairfax commission has already proved a model - showing why to avoid the concept.
It foundered because local Republicans stopped designating a representative to it - and they had a point in claiming it was working in partisan fashion. The commission's tie-breaking "independent" member, who was supposed to be acceptable to the two Republicans and two Democrats on the panel, was Leslie Byrne.
She later won a House of Delegates seat as a Democrat. In 1992, she won a single term from Northern Virginia's new congressional seat - after a remarkably dirty campaign against Henry Butler, son of former 6th District Congressman Caldwell Butler of Roanoke.
Besides, the bulk of questionable campaigning isn't outright lying; rather, it falls in a gray area of distortion, ignoring of context, strategic omission and the like. One man's truth is another's perversion thereof.
If a Fair Practices Commission does not deal with such ambiguities, it risks irrelevance or, worse, tacit endorsement of deceptions that fall just short of lies. But if a commission enters that gray area, the range of discourse on which its presumably chilling effect is exerted is broadened to require ever-more subjective judgments.
Campaign claims should be monitored - but not by governmental commissions. The media, after a slow start, are getting better at it: One example is the "ad watch" now featured in our news columns during political campaigns. Individual voters, too, seem to be growing more alert to, and more willing to punish, distortion-based campaigns.
The horror stories from last year's legislative elections, it should be noted, generally involved candidates who lost.
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMNLY 1996by CNB