Hate the Game

Yes, we have to reform the rules of campaign finance. But we can’t tie our hands in the meantime. A response to Russ Feingold.

The Democratic Party is the party of reform. It is a mantle that the party must not wear lightly. Reform requires constant re-energizing and needs leaders such as Senator Russ Feingold to continuously test and challenge it. Feingold does just that in his essay “Building a Permanent Majority for Reform,” [Issue #27] and I actually agree with much of what he says about the ways in which our system is broken and how the Democratic Party should be spearheading reform. However, until campaign-finance reform is a reality, the party of reform should not be one of perpetual loss.

The Supreme Court failed our nation with its Citizens United decision, which struck down our campaign-finance laws and opened the door to $600 million in super PAC donations this past election cycle. Let me be clear: Super PACs are a bad idea. Nondisclosure breeds a system of campaign finance that Americans should not abide.

But Democrats should not sit idly by as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to overpower the political system. And they’re not raising this money just for their idle amusement. Their causes are crystal clear. You can read Karl Rove’s advice to politicians in this country every week in The Wall Street Journal: how to campaign against the Buffett Rule, how to sell Paul Ryan’s plan to end Medicare, how to blame Senate Democrats for the housing bubble of 2008. You can tell the kind of fossil-fuel future the Koch brothers see for our nation from the ads they ran during election season. In March 2012, a group receiving funding from the Kochs hit President Obama with a $3.6 million ad campaign, criticizing his opposition to oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and his handling of the Keystone XL pipeline. Their fight is for a right-wing ideology that puts corporations first and the middle class last and that would move our country backwards on energy, income inequality, women’s rights, and many other issues—including, yes, campaign finance.

But before we consider the future of campaign finance, let’s examine what happened in our most recent presidential election.

In October 2011, the number of Americans who thought the country was on the right track stood at 15 percent—not far from the 8.9 percent unemployment rate at the time. Consumer confidence had dipped to a historic low.

Most Americans were feeling palpable economic gloom as the President headed into his final campaign. And as Americans were settling in for the presidential contest, Republicans were choosing a former CEO with an astonishing record of making himself and his partners hundreds of millions of dollars and who had extensive connections among America’s rich.

From the beginning, it was clear that Mitt Romney would have the best-funded campaign of any presidential challenger ever. What was also clear was that his allies on the right were arming themselves with hundreds of millions of dollars to do the work that Romney wouldn’t have to do in his own campaign. One wayward billionaire even proposed a $10 million ad campaign attacking the President for his one-time association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

At the beginning of the campaign, progressives had a choice. In the name of campaign-finance reform, should we unilaterally disarm, leaving the door open for Rove, the Kochs, and their allies to pick the next President? Or do we fight like hell with every means at our disposal to ensure that President Obama can continue to fight for all those issues we supported him for in the first place?

Campaign-finance reform is a pillar of progressivism. It first entered the political conversation when President Theodore Roosevelt argued for its need at the beginning of the twentieth century; this led to the Tillman Act of 1907, the first ban on corporate contributions in federal elections. But in 2012, disarming ourselves and failing to do everything in our power to make sure that we could advance our values and fend off the conservative charge seemed like a case of cutting off our nose to spite our face—or, I suppose you could say, cutting seniors off of Medicare, children off of Head Start, and immigrants off from the national mainstream just to spite the Supreme Court.

Many of us weren’t willing to lose an election just to make a point. Campaign-finance reform was not a luxury Democrats could afford to wait for in this election cycle. We live in an uncertain world with hurricanes and disasters and other events that can’t be predicted. But every four years, presidential elections are the most important event that we know with certainty will happen. None of them is worth taking a pass on.

Because of President Obama’s historic and effective campaign, and the efforts of people in outside groups like Priorities USA Action, SEIU, and Planned Parenthood, he won re-election under profoundly difficult circumstances.

Important lessons were learned in this election—but not just by Democrats. While it can be fairly said that Republican groups misspent hundreds of millions of dollars, their donors still seem committed to having right-wing groups advance a severely conservative agenda. At this very moment, individuals on the right are writing off their embarrassing results in 2012 and getting ready to try again. There are freight trains of cash on the right, and they don’t appear to be running out of steam.

Las Vegas entrepreneur Sheldon Adelson has already committed to participating in future elections, likening his $150 million spent in 2012 to a bad bet and promising to double his efforts in the next cycle—“a new hand,” as he calls it. A spokesman for Texas housing tycoon Bob Perry, who has given millions over the years to the GOP and to causes like the “Swift boat” campaign against John Kerry, said that he was “proud” of his participation in the 2012 election cycle—more than $23 million contributed to outside spending groups—and is “likely to continue” his involvement in conservative politics.

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