During each election cycle, predictable bad pennies show up. Like stuck records, stupid ideas are repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum. In today’s Olympian is a letter to the editor complaining about the length and cost of political campaigns. Letter writer Gordon Personius repeats the bad-penny stupid idea that the answer is a 90-day limitation on campaigns, which would be exclusively publicly funded. How many ways to you want to gut the hell out of the First Amendment to do this? No American, left or right, should ever be forced to subsidize offensive political speech, which is the essence of public funding of campaigns.
Of course, this doesn’t deter certain elements of the electorate from continuing their effort to control what speech should be acceptable and how it should be disseminated, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission notwithstanding.
The left – always a hater of free and unfettered speech not towing its party line – has never figured out that the First Amendment’s simple language, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…” means what it says. What part of “no law” do they not understand – the “no” or the “law”?
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently saidthat the answer is changing the channel or turning off the TV if you find political commercials not to your liking or excessive. In other words, take responsibility for your own life. There are some of us who are not so thin skinned or easily offended who welcome political campaigning.
In fact, we need more of it – much more of it. According to OpenSecrets.org, just under $1.5 billion was raised during the 2008 presidential campaign with $1.3 billion of it spent. Compare that to what CBSNews.comreported as the 2009 ad budget for one company, Procter & Gamble, which was $8.6 billion (10.9 percent of net sales).
To sell toothpaste and soap P&G spent six times what all candidates raised and spent to run for president.
Given many of the chowder heads elected to office and some of the mind-boggling ballot measures voters support, it’s patently obvious that the issue isn’t that there’s too much money in politics – there’s not enough opposition money in politics.
Money is the ability to communicate. Whether in person on the campaign trail or through advertising, most assuredly the more money you have the more you’re able to get your message out. And the more money an opponent has, the more it can communicate on what a dunderhead the other guy is.
When you scratch the surface of contribution and spending limits and public financing of campaigns, you find that those who complain about this issue favor candidates or issues that attract little financial support. Whether because their fundraisers are too lazy or too inept to get the job done or because the candidate or issues are too repellant to voters and contributors vary in individual cases – there are no other plausible explanations.
The American people are smart enough, and the Constitution presumes they have the absolute right, to think, discern and make election decisions without anyone “protecting” them from somebody’s idea of excessive political campaigning. Put a sock in it.
Scott St. Clair is a former investigative journalist with Washington’s Freedom Foundation.
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