Sisyphus is No Myth

Or,Remember How We Reformed Campaign Finance?



Fear the 527's.


They're out, and around, and "shadowy," sinister groups that take in money from donors and...brace yourself...take out ads on Television that crititcize government leaders! Dear Sweet Maker! Stop them before they get the children!


We are now faced with the situation where expressing your opinion on the airwaves (unregulated) is now grounds to be sued by the President of the United States. Yep, there's Bush, conferring with McCain via calls from Air Force One, making notes as to how these demons of private opinion can be reined in.


Scott McClellan emphasizes that we're not for making the 527's illegal, oh no. They simply need to be made "live under the same campaign finance restrictions (as hard money groups) because they are engaged in partisan activity." In other words, we're to make them pointless.


I seem to recall that the 2001 McCain-Feingold Incumbency Protection Act was to have solved this problem for us. I though everybody's donations were supposed to be regulated and declared and stamped and approved and pure as the driven snow now. Yet somehow clause 527 escaped their notice. No one wondered, in fine-tuning the great and glorious legislation that McCain-Feingold was, whether there might yet be any loopholes for soft money to slip through. Or perhaps they honestly believed that this loophole wouldn't matter. At any rate, we have a new demon to kill, and our politicians best speechifying will be called to duty.


Campaign Finance Reform is easily the most ludicrous cause of our age. Born of the will to keep politics for the little guy, CFR has instead become a mobius strip of legislation, defamation, and weaseling, doomed to failure because it stands contrary to economics.


The first rule of economics we all learn as children is that Things Cost Money. It's almost never discussed or even recognized, but so do all the things upon which a political campaign depends. Staff, computers, buttons, straw hats with tricolors, they all require cash consistent with market value to acquire. This money must come from somewhere. Half of us don't vote and don't care which guy wins. Most of the rest are too greedy after feeding ourselves, our families, our credit card companies, etc. to feel like giving money to either blue-suited platitude-dispenser. Sure, we'll pull levers on election day, but it's out of a sense of duty, or a profound distaste for one side or another, not a sense of immediate interest. We try to pick the guy we think won't screw things up deliberately.


So that leaves out a substantial number, even a majority, of the voting public. So who in their right mind is going to give somebody else money so that they can pay their little armies of pols and wonks and put images of themselves on during breaks of Survivor promising to Rid the World of Threats to the Bridge to the 21st Century that will Bring the Two Americas Together, plus give us health care?


You can call them those that have a direct stake in certain legislation passing or not passing. You can call them those that have the leisure to devote themselves to the byzantine nuances of legislation. I call them rich people.


Economic and political reality are thus wed. Yet we rightfully fear plutocracy. So politicians, in fits of idealism/power-lust, seek to lay a dam across the funding river, and let flow everything out in thousand-dollar droplets, so that nobody's money is more important than anybody else's. But the weight of interest is always too big for the dam, and ways around or through cracks are constantly sought.


Now let's take the Swift Boaters at their word, and assume that they are merely a group of vets who wish to publicly set the record straight about John Kerry's mini-tour of 'Nam. If they turn out to be right, the public could sour on Kerry, and so benefit the Bush Campaign. In the mind of CFR this constitutes and undeclared, unregulated campaign contribution to the Bush campaign. Hence, it cannot be.


Maybe the Swifties are connected to Dubya and the GOP, but let's look at the principle here: a private citizen, sufficiently fired up by public affairs to want to sway the minds of his fellow citizens, is no longer an examplar of democracy in action but a grave threat to truth and fair play. The freedom of political speech, to make one's voice heard, the one right without which all others are empty promises, is now to be regulated by the powers-that-be. And we all go along, because they know how to push our buttons, and who doesn't love doing something that promises to frustrate the rich (never mind the fact that they never seem to actually get frustrated. That's what money does)?


For his wickedness, the gods punished Sisyphus to monotony: to forever push a boulder up a mountain only to watch it fall again, and again, and again. For our jealousy and apathy, we seem to be similarly cursed: to forever put a paper tiger in a sea of serpents, watch the tiger disintegrate, and be too distracted by this drama to notice that we've forgotten how to kill snakes.