Money and McCain

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nysun.com/article/73286

New York Sun Editorial
March 20, 2008

As a senator, John McCain has pushed for laws restricting political speech and fundraising. He may have been anticipating the torrent of attacks that is about to descend on him. Visitors to the Web site the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations are greeted with a column from the union's president, John Sweeney — who at 73 is two years older than Mr. McCain — claiming that "John McCain is George W. Bush all over again" and that Mr. McCain "opposes our freedom to form unions and bargain."

The AFL-CIO, according to an Associated Press story this week offering a rundown of spending plans by left-of-center groups, plans to spend $53 million on politics in 2008. Individual unions associated with the AFL-CIO and Change to Win will spend another $300 million. The Fund for America, backed by George Soros and the Service Employees International Union and led by a former chief of staff to President Clinton, John Podesta, plans to spend $100 million.

Add $30 million from MoveOn.org Political Action, $35 million from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and millions more from Rock the Vote, Women Voices-Women Vote and the National Council of La Raza, and it easily adds up to more than half a billion dollars that these advocacy groups are preparing to spend on both advertising against Mr. McCain and registering and getting to the polls voters who are likely to be disposed against him.

A Wall Street Journal dispatch yesterday mentioned other left-of-center groups that are expected to get involved in the political debate, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, Emily's List, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, and the League of Conservation Voters. So much for the idea that the McCain-Feingold campaign speech regulations were going to reduce the influence of money on our elections.

The law's backers argue that this "independent" spending is less likely to lead to corruption than the "soft money" contributions that actual politicians once were able to raise for the national political parties, and there may be some logic to that argument, though the headlines out of Washington — Renzi, Cunningham, DeLay, Abramoff — suggest that McCain-Feingold has not succeeded in eliminating corruption. Nor has it succeeded in reducing the influence of money in politics — the money just flows elsewhere, like water downhill.

The question for Mr. McCain is whether he is going to react to this new onslaught of spending with calls for more laws aimed at restricting it or with an effort for similar spending on the right-of-center side of the election. The first approach is a fool's errand, while the second would be a sign that Mr. McCain is coming around to the First Amendment to the Constitution that, if he wins the presidency, he will be sworn to uphold. If the predictions hold up and the left spends what it says it will and the right matches the spending, American voters may yet have an election that illuminates the issues and throws them into sharp relief.

[Clear Blue Sky]

1. Mr Straight-Talk's campaign finance reform laws might come back to bit him in the general election.