Posted on: Friday, July 26, 2002

Island Voices
Money in politics: Time to get serious

Jean Aoki is with the O'ahu League of Women Voters; Larry Meacham is with Common Cause; Laure Dillon and Grace Furukawa are with Hawai'i Clean Elections; Ira Rohter is with the Hawai'i Green Party; Tom Gill is with the American Civil Liberties Union; Scott Foster is with the Advocates for Consumer Rights & Hawai'i Independent Democrats.

Rarely a week goes by without another media story about a politician who has gone astray because of taking large amounts of money from special interests.

Many of the problems we have today with government and the actions of our elected officials are directly connected to "campaign contributions."

Let's get serious here and stop sidestepping the obvious. To get big money for political campaigns, promises are made or implied, easy access to policy-makers is assured, and a lot of business gets done and laws get passed that are not for the benefit of the public. The problems show up everywhere.

At the national level, we see how the oil industry works to reduce environmental standards, pharmaceutical companies charge astronomical prices, healthcare is too expensive for many and yet the insurance industry flourishes. Our natural resources on public lands are on the auction block for sweetheart development deals for timber, oil, mining and grazing, and even some of our national parks are threatened.

The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and countless other environmental laws, ordinances and rules are under severe attack and continually weakened or not aggressively enforced. Huge tax credits and tax cuts pass on billions to corporations that make sizable contributions to influential committee chairs.

The list goes on and on because our elected officials often listen to the people who paid their campaign bills instead of us, the general public.

Then come the allegations, indictments, trials, convictions and jail sentences. Worst of all, many potential voters are so disgusted with the way checkbook government runs that many of us do not even vote. This is where the impact of our current way to finance campaigns gets really, really serious, because now we are talking about the life and death of democracy itself.

That is the bad news. The good news is that there is an excellent alternative to this kind of campaign fund-raising. The Clean Elections model allows qualified candidates to run successful campaigns without private money buying favors. Public campaign financing is the reform that makes all other reforms possible.

We deserve having folks in office who improve the healthcare system (universal healthcare, child and elder care, affordable prescriptions, etc.), who protect our natural resources rather than exploit them, who move aggressively to safeguard the food we eat and remove harmful pesticides and other chemicals from widespread use, who would adequately fund the watchdog agencies such as the Environmental Protection Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, and staff these important agencies with people who are committed to enforcing the laws.

Don't you want to see more people in office whom we can trust and be proud of instead of ashamed? This is the great promise of public campaign financing.

There are opponents to public funding, and most often they are well-entrenched elected officials. They say that "the people" do not want their tax money to pay for campaigns. Some people say politicians are all scoundrels anyway, so why should taxpayers pay to elect them?

The answer is to keep them honest. If we pay for their campaigns, then they are beholden to us, the voters and taxpayers, not to big campaign contributors. Elected officials become scoundrels because of the deals they cut to get elected.

And, by the way, we are already paying for campaigns. The election in 2000 cost about $3 billion, and those costs are passed directly on to us, first with higher prices and then through the special deals and laws, subsidies and tax exemptions that benefit major contributors, instead of us, the public. When the public pays for campaigns, then we, the voters, get to call the shots.

Most important, with public funding, democracy is strengthened. When more of us choose to vote because we have regained our faith in government, then we are stronger and our freedom grows.

Maine and Arizona are paying for campaigns through public funding, with Vermont, Massachusetts and other states following. They like the new system a lot. Their "clean" candidates spend more time actually talking to voters instead of fund-raising and giving away the store to private contributors. More local folks who have community support get enough money from the state to finance a reasonable campaign for office, so there are far fewer races with only one, uncontested, candidate — as is often the case in Hawai'i.

This creates a more level playing field for all candidates. Best of all, the financial ties to big donors are cut completely. It would indeed be a brand-new day.

More and more people in Hawai'i want to switch to public campaign financing, but for the past several years the bills to allow public funding in Hawai'i have been routinely killed by a few powerful state legislators. And it is no coincidence that these are the very same candidates who receive the most donations.

Laudable attempts have been made to reform the current system, but clever inside political maneuvering circumvents those gains. In Washington, D.C, the McCain-Feingold bill is already being mutilated, diluted and challenged in court. Only public funding of campaigns can eliminate the special-interest money.

To get public campaign funding, we the voters are going to have to demand it. We need people in office who understand the importance of giving all of our citizens equal voice in deciding public policy and who will aggressively support the public funding of election campaigns.

Clearly our present system is riddled with loopholes and completely broken. It cannot be patched together or fixed.ÊWe need a whole new system. Public funding of campaigns truly is such a system. It deserves a try.

So during the coming 2002 political campaign, ask everyone running for office the all-important question: "Do you support public funding of political campaigns?"