Although the flameout in April of Matt Brown’s US Senate bid was the most prominent example, he’s hardly been the only Rhode Island candidate to run into a campaign finance-related hassle this year. And while money certainly still flows as the mother’s milk of politics, as the famous axiom has it, this string of instances shows how it can cut as a double-edged sword.The ball got rolling when Brown botched the handling of a controversy in which his campaign sought donations from the Democratic parties of Maine, Massachusetts, and Hawaii in late 2005, and then asked some of its own big givers to make contributions to these groups. More recently, North Providence Mayor A. Ralph Mollis — who accuses Guillaume de Ramel, his wealthy Democratic opponent for secretary of state, of trying to buy the office — ran into criticism when his chief of staff, who doubles as co-manager of his campaign, sought campaign contributions from some town employees.
Around the same time in late June, it was revealed that Attorney General Patrick Lynch received campaign donations from DuPont’s chief negotiator while discussions were ongoing with the company about it being dropped from a lawsuit against former lead paint companies. (Mollis and Lynch responded to their respective issues by faulting their opponents and denying any link between political contributions and their conduct in office.) Meanwhile, Sue Stenhouse, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, attracted the ire of Democrats when the state Board of Elections gave her approval to seek state matching campaign funds even after she missed the deadline for doing so.
While many candidates are capable of building massive war chests without causing self-inflicted wounds, such flawlessness isn’t necessarily much better. With sharply contested battles for governor, US Senate, and the expected November ballot question on a Harrah’s Entertainment-Narragansett Indian casino, 2006 is likely to go down as a record-setting year for campaign spending in Rhode Island (the tab in just the Senate race could approach $10 million). Yet when such mega-bucks prove decisive, typically marking the difference between which candidates can — or can’t — get their message out through television commercials, well-funded interest groups and affluent contributors seem to steadily outflank the influence of average citizens.
Trying to counteract the prevailing power of money in American politics, as demonstrated by efforts at the federal level since Watergate, is notoriously difficult. A handful of states, including Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, North Carolina and New Mexico, have nonetheless adopted a different approach for financing campaigns, known as Clean Elections, which is meant to diminish the influence of money and make campaigns more competitive, by considerably expanding the public financing of elections.
Although not without critics and facing a lack of support in some instances (Clean Elections has been weakened or repealed in Vermont and Massachusetts), the concept has an array of supporters — ranging from the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the ACLU, and Senator John McCain of Arizona to the editorial pages of the New York Times and USA Today. And considering the frequency of campaign-finance scandals in the states and at the national level, it’s only natural that some activists are thirsting for a different approach.
Still, even though many Rhode Island politicians readily acknowledge their dislike for campaign fundraising, there’s hardly a groundswell of local support for Clean Elections, even from the two self-described reformers competing for the governor’s office, Republican incumbent Donald L. Carcieri and Democratic challenger Charles Fogarty. Meanwhile, the greatest challenge facing proponents is still posed by how the political body with the most to lose from Clean Elections — the General Assembly — is the one that must approve it for the concept to move forward.
Are Clean Elections a better way?
While some critics dislike the notion of increasing the public financing of elections, there can be little doubt that the status quo comes with considerable costs
As H. Philip West Jr., executive director of Common Cause of Rhode Island, notes, “The candidates are served poorly, because they have to spend so much of their time chasing campaign contributions, and they wind up being beholden to large special interests — which are the only way they can fund a major campaign.”
And, as with the GOP Senate primary between Lincoln Chafee and Stephen P. Laffey, the opponents “wind up inevitably in a battle of television ads that leave both candidates bloodied and diminished, and ultimately give the victor the office, but not much respect,” West adds. With the growing polarization of American politics and the increasing savagery of commercials, “ordinary citizens are left thinking, ‘Neither one of these candidates is any good — what’s the use?’ And that diminishes public trust in government as a whole.”
Although candidates could still build big war chests through private donations, Clean Elections would challenge such disparities with voluntary spending limits on candidates for General Assembly and the state’s five general offices. “Clean” candidates would enjoy a certain public benefit, or so the thinking goes, for abiding by the voluntary limit.
