Dr. Brooks and Mr. Hyde Park
(posted by Daniel Koffler)
So. Let’s say you’re a center-right pundit with a reputation you feel you deserve for non-partisan evenhandedness and ideological heterodoxy. Even for being a bit of a contrarian. So when Barack Obama torpedoed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regime, that might strike you as a teachable moment for liberals. After all, the McCain-Feingold regime is simply the latest iteration of a post-Watergate regulatory framework ostensibly designed to curb unseemly financial influences on the political system, but has achieved, with every new iteration, more expansive criminalization of political speech. What it has not achieved is any halt in the growth of the influence of allegedly malign special interests. On the contrary, some iterations of campaign finance regulation have actually augmented special interest influence.
E.g., the McCain-Feingold regime shunts what would previously have been soft money donations directly to campaigns into so-called independent “527″ efforts and created a legal veneer of plausible deniability by which a candidate can separate herself from independent expenditures on her behalf, while creating new avenues by which people can be prosecuted for running afoul of pointless regulation, and continuing to confiscate the property of citizens to spend on political causes they may or may not support. All in all, a pretty abysmal result from a libertarian, liberal, or conservative perspective.
One would think a center-right pundit known for his independence of thought would have celebrated the demise of the McCain-Feingold regime, and taken the opportunity provided by Senator Obama’s repudiation of it (however nakedly self-interested it might be) to make the point to liberals and Democrats, who would be unusually receptive given their own rationalizations of Senator Obama’s move, that campaign finance regulation is at best a Sisyphian waste of resources and energy — and not a matter of making the right tweaks to campaign finance laws, because there are no right tweaks to make. Nor is the lesson a purely negative one. The self-interested reason Obama opted out of the campaign finance system is that he has demonstrated how the combination of an unregulated market and technology can make public financing superfluous. Indeed, an independent thinker of the center right just might see the whole episode as a propitious moment to warm up people on the left to the idea that private associations can frequently solve problems that government programs are powerless to solve.
David Brooks, however, is so shocked, shocked that a presidential candidate trying to win an election would refuse to give away a 3-to-1 or better financial advantage (but not by the soi-disant champion of campaign finance reform illegally gaming his own eponymous campaign finance regime), that he is happy to squander the opportunity to bring the left aboard the cause of scrapping campaign finance regulation. What better use of the most coveted real estate in opinion journalism could there be, after all, than to write Redstate-quality copy mocking the Democratic candidate as a used car salesman, and thereby help conservatives along in their Eurasia-Eastasia flip on McCain-Feingold?
Fortunately, Brooks is back in form this week, explaining that the qualities that led George Bush to be such an awful president in his first term have led him to make all the right decisions in his second term. Now there’s some contrarianism.
June 24th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Money quote:
And so now do we go after the 527s? Blogger-fundraising for issues advocacy? I have sympathy for those who want to take vast corporate $$ out of elections, but cannot see any cure that isn’t as bad as, if not worse than, the disease.
June 24th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
No, not at all. We’re not disagreeing. I’m for totally unlimited fundraising by anyone for any cause + transparency. What I’m against is the law reifying some formal separation between a campaign and issues advocacy on its behalf.
June 24th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I just want to give Daniel a big fat welcome. Great inaugural post, man.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Daniel, d’accord. And also welcome — I agree with Jim that you are one smart and insightful dude.