A fanatic, according to the legendary “Archey Road” barkeep Mr. Dooley, is someone who does what the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case. Mr. Dooley could have added that reformers are the same way: they try to accomplish what the populace would demand if only the populace paid attention. “The people are with us, whether they know it yet or not,” is the battle cry of school-choicers, reproductive-choicers, term-limiters, gun-controllers, and campaign-finance reformers.
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It usually goes without saying that something needs to be done about political campaigns, which are widely viewed as both the heart of democracy and ignorant exercises in ten-second sleaze bites. When I was talking recently with State Representative Clem Balanoff (now a congressional candidate) about the difficulty of getting a utility-reform bill out of committee, he interrupted his own story to declare, “We need campaign-finance reform” because of the utilities’ “tremendous financial control” over state lawmakers.
But here is a subject that causes political scientists to throw up their hands in despair at the distance between the reformers’ cliches and the facts. Do political action committee contributions influence roll call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives? Not noticeably, once you take other factors (like the political complexion of their districts) into account. Are congressional campaigns, which cost a total of $445 million in 1990, “obscenely expensive”? Not by realistic comparison: Sears’s 1990 advertising budget was over $1.4 billion. (These examples come from political scientist Frank J. Sorauf’s 1992 book Inside Campaign Finance: Myths and Realities.) What’s amazing is that Hansen’s midwesterners came rather close to the experts’ skepticism even though such skeptical views rarely show up in the media. Maybe there’s something to this democracy idea after all.
“We intentionally targeted this audience,” writes Hansen. “Major shifts in policy direction–whether on health care, trade or political reform–rarely occur and succeed without their prior understanding and acceptance.” He figures that if you’re trying to get something done, the informed opinion of such people carries more weight than the uninformed opinion of a random sample of the public.
Hansen sent a copy of his report–Heartland Voices: Americans Talk About Money, Politics and Reform–to Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause. He hasn’t heard back. Since Broder gave it a favorable mention in the Washington Post, however, Hansen says a number of CC chapters around the country have called up. Hansen himself claims to be “agnostic” on the campaign-finance issue. He thinks the reformers could convince people, but not by their current strategy of listing big-money contributions to U.S. senators and representatives and saying, “Ain’t it awful?”
