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player ready...One big problem with campaign finance laws, as David Wright sees it, is that you just can’t spend enough money.
While many say they are angered by the influence of money in politics, the Peoria magazine publisher takes a contrarian view. He wants Sen. Phil Gramm elected president and he wanted to contribute a lot more to the Texas Republican than the $1,000 limit under federal election law.
So with Carol Jones, a Peoria business associate, Wright produced a brochure and sent 50,000 copies to Republican households in Iowa. The brochure, drawn from campaign materials sent him from the Gramm campaign, juxtaposes votes of Gramm and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) in a way that disparages the GOP frontrunner.
The cost? At least $12,000.
Both Wright and Jones, who also donated $1,000 to Gramm, insist theirs is a strictly free-lance venture, unconnected to the Gramm campaign.
But their brochure illustrates a growing and, some say, questionable way in which individual citizens and organizations as big as the National Rifle Association and the AFL-CIO circumvent federal laws intended to limit the amount of money any single interest can pour into a campaign.
The brochure circulating in Iowa is one of the first examples of an independent campaign in this presidential election year.
It is in no way unique, and by other standards, rather modest. The National Rifle Association, the Christian Coalition, cattle ranchers and others collectively have poured millions into these kinds of campaigns in past elections, often with surgically precise results.
For some watchdog groups, election law scholars and candidates, such spending raises troubling issues. There are no limits on these dollars. The brochures and ads themselves are expressions of free speech and thus scarcely regulated by federal election laws. The people who create them are not accountable to voters. And they provide another advantage to those with ready cash.
But precisely because there are so few restrictions on independent spending, these campaigns are becoming an increasingly popular arsenal in the modern campaign.
“They are nearly impossible to police,” said James Reichley, a professor of political science at Georgetown University. “How can you determine whether collusion has taken place?
“In theory, the donors are not acting in coordination with the candidates: they are just expressing their views. But in practice, there has been collusion. The truth is hard to get at.”
The pro-Gramm mailing seems to push the envelope of permissible spending. Federal Election Commission regulations on independent expenditures say that an independent effort cannot be drawn even “in part (from) materials prepared by the candidate.”
“If there is a public purpose in not having large amounts of money poured into the campaigns, and in having a relatively level playing field, obviously independent expenditures defeat that purpose,” Reichley said.
The U.S. Supreme Court cloaked independent spending with free speech protection in a 1976 decision, and from that point independent spending campaigns have flourished.
Though “official” campaigns are supposed to be entirely separate from the “independent” ones, many critics believe they often are not. One high-profile case, revealed in former Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood’s diaries, lays bare just how collusive the relationship can be.
The diaries divulge that Packwood consulted with gun and auto dealer lobbyists about the “independent” ads they produced for him. Packwood said in his diaries that he routinely consulted with those making “independent expenditures” on his behalf.
For instance, in October 1992, six days before the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action spent $22,613 on a mailing to its members opposing Packwood’s challenger, Packwood wrote in his diary that he had discussed the material with an NRA official. “God is it tough!” Packwood wrote.
In another entry, Packwood discussed an independent expenditure being prepared on his behalf by the Automobile Dealers and Drivers for Free Trade PAC. “Of course, we can’t know anything about it,” he wrote. “We’ve got to destroy any evidence we’ve ever had of (blank) so that we have no connection with any independent expenditure.”
The PAC made $66,539 worth of independent expenditures on Packwood’s behalf in October and November 1992.
“While such candid revelations are rare, the practices they expose are all too common,” said Ellen S. Miller, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics.
In post-Watergate campaign finance reforms, Congress initially sought to limit the amount that could be spent on independent expenditures, but the Supreme Court said Congress went too far in trying to limit them. “. . . The governmental interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption is inadequate to justify (a) ceiling on independent expenditures,” the court said in the 1976 decision.
Perhaps the best known “independent expenditure” was the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad, which alleged that Michael Dukakis had as governor furloughed a vicious criminal, helping to swing votes to George Bush. The ad was produced by the National Security Political Action Committee.
Though some contended that the Bush campaign had a role in the ad, it was never proven.
“The problem is that people who spend money this way aren’t really accountable, unlike the candidate who at least has to answer for what is said in his name,” said Gerald Pomper, a political science professor at Rutgers University. “So you have a potential loose cannon with growing firepower.”
To be truly independent, the person who made the expenditure cannot have or have had any ties to the campaign and the materials they use cannot be supplied by the campaign.
In the case of the pro-Gramm brochure, Wright contends that he received information that many other Gramm donors did and that the votes he highlighted were a matter of public record anyway.
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“The Gramm campaign can’t endorse this. You can’t be in collusion with them in any way,” Wright said. “That could get their campaign in trouble with the Federal Election Commission.”
Wright and Jones went through some rather elaborate steps to create the mailing. Wright formed a business called J&D Enterprises to produce the pamphlets out of the same office where he edits two give-away monthlies, one that focuses on Peoria business, the other on women. That office also houses a printing business, which was used to print the brochures.
The text of the brochure closely resembles the material already circulated by the Gramm campaign in other states such as Maryland and Florida.
“It’s just something I developed by looking through some of the material that I’d received from the Gramm campaign,” Wright said. “I get materials from the Gramm campaign. They’ve done similar type comparisons with Dole’s record and Gramm’s record, and I’ve just kept a tally of some of these.”
Wright said that “$12,000 to $15,000, probably” had been spent so far to produce and mail the Iowa brochures, and Jones “has put up the money for most of this.”
Wright said he and Jones decided to produce the brochures because they were frustrated by the limits put on campaign donations.
“That’s where it came from,” Wright said.
Television networks and newspapers, which Wright contends are biased, “can spend the equivalent of millions of dollars putting whatever slant they want to on it, but the candidates themselves are so limited in what they can do to get their message out.”
The media “can make a candidate look as bad as they want to, and there’s absolutely no limit on that at all. But when it comes to the campaign spending, there are limits.
“See, a lot of people don’t know anything about independent expenditures. They don’t know they can do anything.
“I guess I just felt like Gramm needs some help getting the message out.”
Wright is offering to produce and mail the brochures at 38 cents apiece for anyone who orders at least $5,000 worth.
So far, he said, “there hasn’t been an overwhelming response.”
There have been “a few phone calls, a couple of letters. Nobody really stepping forward and saying, I believe in this and I want to put some real money behind it.
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” he added. “We’ll see how it goes.”