Buying of the President Interview with John Kerry (June 2007)

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Jules Witcover interviewed Kerry on June 13, 2007.

The first thing I would like to ask you your views on the future of the matching-funds system. Do you think that has any future? Do you think candidates who don’t opt out of the system can have any kind of reasonable chance to be nominated?

Providing you have a sufficient base, based on an issue of the moment or your own record and experience, it’s possible — I underscore “possible”— for a matching-fund candidate to win. But it’s much more difficult unless the matching funds are, themselves, reformed, so that you have a sufficient level of match that is guaranteed and a sufficient total level of funding timely delivered in the appropriate quantity. If that doesn’t happen, it is doomed. And frankly, it’s flawed, because it forces battleground-state campaigns rather than national campaigns. In my experience, we had to ration money, and in fact even pull out of three states where we were perilously close. And I believe if we could have stayed and afforded to stay, it would have made a world of difference. But the finance situation doesn’t allow that.

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How would you reform it?

You have to have a comprehensive reform. You have to have a limitation on these individual groups and the nature of their attacks. And you got to have some kind of response capacity. I mean, we ought to get back to some sort of equal time or other free advertising time. There are any number of options that have been on the table through the years. This lowest unit rate to candidates is a joke. I mean, the lowest unit rate is exorbitant. Campaigns spend tens of millions of dollars and the media, which are licensed by the federal government, walk off with these incredible amounts of money.

I have advocated that ever since I came here. I was one of the leading advocates of full campaign finance, public funding, full funding reform. I wrote the bill with David Boren and George Mitchell back in the ’80s. We actually passed it at one point. And George Herbert Walker Bush vetoed it. And I went with Bill Bradley and Joe Biden to visit with Clinton in 1993 in the Oval Office to persuade him to do campaign-finance reform when we had the majority of both houses and the White House. And he declined to do that. And I think we paid an enormous price for not having done that. But you have to have a comprehensive reform. I am not for Band-Aid reforms anymore. I am not for coming in and limiting Congress and what they can do here, and then individual groups can go out and just murder you on their own. Enough of that.

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Kerry also wrote and introduced a Clean Money, Clean Elections Act in 1997:

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The following year, a re-elected Kerry was in another lonely position as one of only five original sponsors of the Clean Money, Clean Elections Act, to provide for full public financing of Congressional elections. The measure would remove practically all special-interest money from House and Senate campaigns. (Kerry's colleagues were Wellstone, Leahy, John Glenn and Joe Biden--all Democrats.) "Kerry was totally into it," says Ellen Miller, former executive director of Public Campaign, a reform group pressing for the legislation. "He believes in this stuff."

In introducing the legislation, Kerry said on the Senate floor, "Special interest money is moving and dictating and governing the agenda of American politics.... If we want to regain the respect and confidence of the American people, and if we want to reconnect to them and reconnect them to our democracy, we have to get the special interest money out of politics." He was also a backer of the better-known McCain-Feingold legislation, a more modest and (some might say) problematic approach to campaign reform. But over the years he's pointed to the Clean Money, Clean Elections Act as the real reform. "It is a tough position in Congress to be for dramatic change in financing elections," says Miller. "It's gutsy to go out and say, 'Let's provide a financially leveled playing field so there is more competition for incumbents.' Kerry and Wellstone were the leaders and took a giant step. It was remarkable."

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