Paying for Campaigns

The Senate is now having belated second thoughts about Senator Russell Long's Campaign Financing Act, pushed hurriedly through an adjourning Congress last October. They have good reason. The Long Act gives money to presidential nominees--who don't need it--and provide national party leaders an unhealthy control over the choice of local candidates.

The need for reform in campaign financing is plain enough. Any serious candidate for state or local office these days must mount a television campaign, and that is an extraordinarily expensive undertaking. As a result, personal wealth--or wealthy friends--is more and more becoming a prerequisite for office. The danger that big money can choose the candidates increases yearly.

Long's bill, however, offers no solution to the problem. It aids the one set of candidates who don't need help: presidential nominees. The bill enables voters to contribute one tax dollar to a presidential campaign fund by checking a box on their income tax form. The money would be divided between the national committees of the major parties. A third party could share the funds if it polled more than five million votes in the previous presidential ballot.

The glaring funding imbalances, however, occur on the state and local level. In 1966 Governor Rockefeller spent $7 million in winning the governorship of New York. His opponent, Frank O'Connor, was able to scrape up only a half million. If O'Connor were to run again in 1970, he would receive no money. But based on the Long formula, struggling candidate Lyndon Johnson may receive 30 million dollars in 1968. Financing presidential campaigns may suit Lyndon Johnson's plans for '68, but it hardly suits Long's rhetoric (studded with references to the "poor boy making good" and boys from "log cabins") or the reality of American campaign financing.

Long's bill is not merely superfluous; it is dangerous. Giving money to the national committee would immeasurably increase party power at the national level; the bill would, as Senator Gore has pointed out, create national political party slush funds that committees could use to help state and local candidates of their choice. Critics have been so loud and insistent on this point that Long has proposed, in a "perfecting amendment," that the money go directly to a presidential candidate, instead of to his party's national committee. To prevent the nominees from using the money to buy local candidates personally, Long has also suggested guidelines for how the money may be spent.

This alternative is little more attractive than the original bill's proposal. Though unable to give money directly to candidates, the presidential aspirant could still spend extra funds in joint campaigns and joint publicity with local candidates of his choice. Local candidates are always hesitant to break with national figures, but giving new resources to presidential nominees would make a show of independence that much more painful.

It is plain that any attempt to cope seriously with the problems of campaign funding must aim at financing of state and local races. But there are tricky constitutional questions involved. The conduct of such campaigns comes clearly under the jurisdiction of state legislatures, and any attempt to offer federal aid from tax revenues might be ruled unconstitutional. President Johnson has appointed a blue-ribbon committee, headed by Richard E. Neustadt, to study the entire question of election reforms. Neustadt's report, which has been mysteriously withheld by the President, may clarify this issue and offer some alternatives to the muddled Long Act.

In the meantime, the Senate should send the issue of campaign funding back to committee, where it can get the broad, fresh look it needs.