COLUMN: The Money Marathon: A Political Race

From Chris Iorillo's "The Buck Stops Now," Fall '95 From Chris Iorillo's "The Buck Stops Now," Fall '95It used to be that ambitious little kids, when prodded by their parents, would tell everyone that they wanted to grow up to be President. But not today. The naive beholders of this dream must start early if they expect to be contenders in a presidential election of the next century. At the rate campaign spending is going, it would not be unwise to counsel the future leaders of the free world to start building a network of potential moguls and millionaires while still in grammar school. The amount spent by presidential hopefuls, from the primaries to election day, is staggering. In 1992, the total spent by all the candidates was in excess of $550 million dollars. Estimates for 1996 put the number well over $600 million. Phil Gramm's finance chair summed up the early heats of the election year by saying, "If you don't have gas, you can't push the car very far." Already, several potentially strong candidates have realized they don't have or want to get the gas and have dropped out of the race Jack Kemp, Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, William Bennet and Carroll Campbell Jr. all cite the pressure of raising millions of dollars in a short period of time as the main reason they have chosen to sit this one out. Several possible candidates, such as Pete Wilson, William Weld and Richard Lugar, have hinted that the demands of fundraising may keep them from the '96 race as well. The demand for campaign cash is even more voracious this year as two of the big states, California and New York, have moved their primaries to March in order to play a larger role in the party nomination. To win delegates in these states and the other primaries, campaign veterans estimate the candidates will have to spend roughly $44 million in the primary season. That means they will have to raise roughly $400,000 a week in order to fill their campaign coffers with at least $20 million by Christmas in order to take advantage of government matching funds. Government matching funds? The Federal government will match all the contributions of up to $250 made to the candidates in the year prior to January 1996. The money for this funding comes from tax dollars. On the top of every 1040 tax return form is a box the taxpayer can check if she wants $1 of her total taxes set aside for the presidential campaign fund. This fund is having problems, though. In 1980, 29 percent of taxpayers indicated they wanted to contribute to the fund. But in 1992, only 19 percent checked the "yes" box. This leaves the Federal Election Commission worried that it will not have the $213 million it estimates it will have to dole out for the '96 election. After all of this, then, we are left with a pool of candidates who are not bothered by the prospect of groveling for cash. Just who are the $600 million dollar men? Senator Phil Gramm has already transferred $5 million from his Senate campaign fund to his election fund and added another $4 million two weeks ago from a single fund-raiser in Dallas. Majority leader Bob Dole has $2 million in his war chest and is looking to get paid back for the $1 million his PAC gave out to congressional candidates last fall. Lamar Alexander, the flannel-shirted "outsider" who was Bush's Education Secretary, has an ambitious fundraising team which has scheduled 23 fundraising events for the candidate from March 6 to April 15. Pennsylvania's own Senator Arlen Specter has a powerful fundraising base which netted him $11 million in his 1992 re-election bid for the Senate. And President Clinton can surely be expected to court Hollywood money-men like Michael Ovitz and David Geffen for the $25,000 a person fund-raisers they held for him in '92 election. The race for money is so aggressive that "just hours" after Jack Kemp told one of his major fund-raisers, Mel Sembler, that he was out of the race, the millionaire developer was inundated with phone calls. Like vultures competing for a lone straggler in the desert, Alexander, Gramm, Specter and Dole jumped to get their meathooks on Mel's cash. In this environment, the candidates are campaigning harder to gather dollars than they are to earn votes. Forced to court contributors in big money cities like New York and Los Angeles, the campaign teams spend their hours wooing donors rather than creating innovative and aggressive platforms to deal with the multitude of problems facing this country. Money has perverted the presidential campaign so much that the ordinary voter, who cannot afford or does not want to give even $20, has grown more cynical and withdrawn from the process. In the last Presidential election, only 56 percent of the voting age population actually voted. Have the candidates, by shifting their emphasis from vote-getting to fundraising, alienated the voter and undercut the democratic principles of the election process? The only candidates we can expect to see in the next election are those who, for whatever reason, have established circles which can raise tremendous amounts of money early in the race. An aspiring candidate from a poor state or one who has spent his or her time serving constituents rather than courting fund-raisers will most certainly be shut out. In addition, people don't give money for no reason. Massive election fundraising will undoubtedly lead to ethically questionable political paybacks as donors suddenly become ambassadors, commissioners and board members. As it stands today, the Democrat National Committee estimates that Cabinet secretaries are already drawn from their work to "provide two or three briefings each month for major donors." If we want to have responsible democracy in this country, we must diminish the control money has over the presidential election. In order to undercut the role of major donors, public financing should be increased by raising the awareness of the tax return checkoff system. A 1994 survey showed that most people found it "sketchy, vague, and incomplete" and chose not to participate in something they did not understand. The amount of the checkoff should be raised from one dollar to two or three, as well. As advertising costs consume up to 30 percent of the campaign dollars, the networks should be prodded into providing equally distributed free advertising time to the candidates. A little unselfish patriotism won't force them out of business. And finance reform should be extended to Congress. Members of Congress run for election without any rules on campaign finance, thereby excluding highly qualified candidates who may not have the right friends or background to raise enough money. Filtered out at the bottom of the system, these people cannot realistically expect to run for President. But there is one element of the democratic process which, if continued to be ignored, will perpetuate the flaws the system has now. People don't vote. If presidential campaign finance reform succeeds, your votes will be the key to getting our $600 million worth out of the next election.