That “you get what you pay for” is a bromide, an inarguable
one. It’s an idea that is sometimes used
to connect campaign finance reform with common sense.
That “nature abhors a vacuum” is another bromide, one called
to mind by journalists,
and opponents, on the left
and right, of efforts
to bring certain advocacy groups, the “527s,” within the ambit of
campaign finance regulation.
Mix two bromides, you get a nostrum (which, Google says, is “a medicine of secret composition and
unproven or dubious effectiveness”), such as this one: If 527s don’t pay for
it, somebody else will.
The “it” in this
instance is political speech incumbents prefer not to hear. The “somebody” will be other advocacy groups,
organized under several certain sections of the Internal Revenue Code that
begin with “5” but do not end in “27”.
The net result is
confusion for political non-professionals about what “reform” is, was, or will
be in the field of campaign finance. Which is nothing new, and unlikely to change. McCain, Feingold and company have cornered
the campaign finance reform brand, and presumptive challengers are in distant
view. Barack Obama should be given
credit for putting his chin out.
The Yale political
scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber, in Get
Out the Vote, How to Increase Voter Turnout (Yale University Press, 2004), venture
that financial conflicts of interest among campaign managers may explain their
self-enriching over-reliance on professional get-out-the-vote methods
(commercial phone banks and direct mail), versus more effective personal
methods (volunteers organized to phone and walk precincts).
Whether we’re
talking about 527s and how to distinguish insurgent from self-interested
political speech, or thinking about how Republicans beat Democrats at GOTV last
time out, the truth of the matter is that the best politics is personal. Professionalize politics, and people push
away.
Those last two bromides
suggest an additional nostrum: It’s not
Astroturf to the person who paid for the fertilizer.
