THEY are Colorados elder statesmen theyve talked the political talk, walked the political walk and know the political process like the back of their hands.
And after this weeks 2010 midterm election with its relentless waves of nasty, misleading, snarky, sometimes dishonest and often infantile advertising they are seriously unhappy with what theyre seeing.
Hank Brown, Pat Schroeder and Dick Lamm Republican, Democrat, and hard-to-classify no longer hold political office, and by today the outcome of Tuesdays elections are already well-known, but their global perspective on the way campaigns are being run these days and the implications of such campaigning are eye-openers.
None of them, of course, are strangers to attack ads. Negative campaigning has been part of politics since the days of the Roman senate, after all. But theres something new and very disturbing about current campaigning in the US, these three veterans, representing a wide range of political persuasions, agree.
To varying degrees, they worry that whats happening doesnt bode well for American democracy.
The role of corporate money in financing attack ads, mostly funneled through 527s, nonprofit political organizations allowed to participate in political activities without having to disclose the sources of their funding, is paramount among their concerns.
A complex and bitterly contested Supreme Court decision earlier this year, which essentially opened the door to such soft money contributions to election advertising, under certain circumstances, dramatically enhanced the influence of 527s on elections.
While soft money cant be used directly in a candidates campaign, and while any advertising it pays for cannot mention the name of the candidate it supports, it certainly can be used to attack a candidates opponent.
Brown, Schroeder and Lamm subject to the same televised tsunami as the rest of us over the past few months say that negative orientation is precisely what most concerns them.
While they, like most of the rest of us, breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday morning when the tsunami finally ended, their worries dont stop there
BROWN, a Republican who served as a US congressman and senator from Colorado (1980-90 and 1990-96 respectively) before entering academia (serving as president of UNC and CU, where he now teaches), minces no words when discussing the role of corporate money in elections.
The use of 527s has really damaged the process, he told the Intermountain Jewish News early this week, just before Election Day. It allows people to run ads that theyre not responsible for. It gives people the ability to do anonymous attacks.
During his own experience as a campaigner, Brown faced his own share of negative ads.
Negative ads arent new, he says. Obviously they existed then too, but at least you could hold the other person responsible.
Today, money can be funneled through 527s by people like huge Democratic donor Pat Stryker, based in Colorado, and whoever is on the Republican side, Brown says. Such donors can finance negative ads without having their name attached. I think it leads to more negative and also less responsible advertising.
While Brown is not sure whether stridently negative ads actually have a direct impact on elections Democrats are still Democrats and Republicans are still Republicans he is concerned that it does make it more difficult to get good people to run for office.
For various reasons, hes also not convinced that this years Supreme Court decision played all that significant a role in creating the pall of negativity hovering over the midterm election.
That does not, however, mitigate Browns concern or anger.
To suggest, for example, that in the Seventh Congressional District the Republican candidate is exporting jobs is just ludicrous, he says.
That individuals and corporations can anonymously attack a candidate saying things they would never say if their name was attached is disgusting and despicable, Brown charges.
He is not, however, fatalistic about the prevalence of 527 funding.
Brown feels that the general ebb and flow of American politics, and the likelihood that such currently contentious issues as the economy and the deficit will lessen in prominence, will probably diminish the problem.
This has gone to an extreme, he says, and I think were going to back away from it.
LESS sanguine about the implications of negative campaigning is Pat Schroeder, the Democratic US congresswoman from Denver from 1973 to 1997, and briefly a candidate for the US presidency in 1987.
Shes so concerned about it that she has come out of her Florida retirement to rejoin the liberal lobbying organization Common Cause, which is seeking legislative solutions.
If we dont so something about this election process, were really in trouble, Schroeder told the IJN via telephone on Monday.
There used to be a thing called the Fairness Doctrine, the equal time doctrine, during the first few years when I was in office. We assumed that the airways were public and if somebody attacked you on the airwaves then you had the right for equal time.
That kind of saved me. If somebody was wailing away about what that idiot was doing, at least I could say, Well, this is what I was doing. You heard both sides.
That was done away with in the 80s by Ronald Reagan and has never come back. Now youve got these TV and radio guys who can attack you all day long and they can even refuse to run commercials. They can certainly refuse to let you on the air for free equal time and they can also refuse you pay time, if they want to. Thats the first problem.
Exacerbating the problem, Schroeder continues, is this years nutty Supreme Court decision, which not only gives corporations more privacy rights than individuals but sets no limits on the amount of money they can spend for electioneering.
If you and I give money, we can only give $2,300 and we have to report it.
Its such an awful situation where all of these groups come in and you dont know who they are. They have a name but that doesnt say a thing about them. Its just a corporate shell and you cant pierce that corporate shell.
Schroeder feels such indirect funding gives candidates excessive control over their own campaign message, or at least the aggressive aspects of it. Many of them, she says, now feel less obligated to communicate with media, minimizing the risk of making a verbal mistake or being cornered in an interview.
The whole thing is, Im just going to let these other groups destroy my opponent, so it looks like you the candidate arent doing it.
And you know the old adage: If you say something long enough and loud enough and over and over and over enough, people start to believe in it. It works.
Everybody says they hate negative campaigning, but it works. Thats the bad news.
Even worse news, however, is the question of candidates allegiance the old political specter of buying influence, she says.
You and I know that nobody spent that money just for the fun of it. Theyre going to want something, and we have no clue what theyre going to want. They will come in and say to their candidate: You know what we did to your opponent? You either fall in with us or well do that to you next time. That will get peoples attention.
Schroeder is working with Common Cause to explore such legislative solutions as public campaign financing and disclosure requirements.
She realizes, however, that it will be an uphill battle.
Once again, youre going to have candidates who got elected under this system. If they start to vote for disclosure, guess whats going to happen to them? Any of those kind of reforms are really hard.
Schroeder admits that if she was beginning her political career today, shed be very unlikely to run for Congress.
If youre a young person and dont have a ton of money . . . why would you get up there? Its like painting a bulls eye on yourself, putting a blindfold on and letting everybody shoot. And you dont even know whos shooting at you. Thats not a good combination.
DICK Lamm, Colorados Democratic governor from 1975-87 and a presidential candidate for the Reform Party in 1996 and still remembered as Governor Gloom for his tendency to offer doomsday prognostications freely admits that current campaigning practices have done little to alleviate his disposition.
Currently co-director of DUs Institute for Public Policy, Lamm says this years election is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from earlier elections in its negative advertising.
Its been a linear process, he says. I dont think we should be surprised, but I think we should be disgusted.
The Supreme Court decision certainly magnifies the problem. From all the understanding that I have, when you look at the rise of the 527s, probably a lot of this is due to the new money coming in in a negative way. The trend was there already, but this accelerates it.
Lamm takes the implications very seriously.
In a way, he told the IJN, Im sorry you asked because you get the real apocalyptic Dick Lamm.
I and a number of thoughtful people dont see how you can keep democracy alive when you allow money to be such a large factor.
In other words, the way we choose our candidates has nothing to do with their quality, their integrity, their ideas. It has to do with how much special interest money they can raise. That just cant be good for a sustainable democracy.
Like Schroeder, Lamm fears that qualified and attractive potential candidates will be discouraged from embarking on political careers.
It used to be a healthier system never perfect but we certainly never saw this magnitude, and it is keeping good people away, he says.
In my experience in Colorado, and I think it applies nationally, there is a survival of the unfittest, a reverse Darwinism, where the better legislators ask themselves, why do I want to do this?
Lamm says that legislators and policymakers should pursue public campaign financing and develop a structure whereby candidates could access free or reduced-cost broadcast advertising.
The only possible answer would be to try to experiment, Lamm says.
Arizona and Maine, I think, have started down the road of public financing. Some attempt to see whether we could make that work better would be called for.
Perhaps characteristically, Lamm sees a larger, less visible, problem looming behind the obvious one.
This isnt only about elections, he says.
This turns the public off to all the governmental institutions in our society. It brings everything down with it. When you have this kind of negative campaigning, not only do people get mad at the various candidates, they get mad at the whole system.
Ultimately, its shooting ourselves in the foot.
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
