San Diego Transcript & La Jolla Light - July 13, 2006No One Knows if Springtime Spending Really Was Independent
By Thomas Elias"Maybe the state should next try public financing for candidates who can't match the personal fortunes of their opponents, as one of this fall's ballot initiatives will propose."
Strict limits cap the amounts of campaign donations by individuals, companies and organizations to any candidate for state office in California. The most anyone can give either Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or his Democratic rival Phil Angelides this year is $44,600 -- half in the primary election season and half for the November runoff.
That makes it difficult candidates to raise the $35 million or so that has been standard for a general election run for a top-of-the-ticket job like governor or U.S. senator.
The reasons for these limits are clear: When they passed the contribution caps via the year-2000 Proposition 34, voters wanted to end an era when it was easy to believe top officials were beholden to the people who provided their campaign cash.
And yet ... it still costs at least $30 million to stage a respectable run for major office in California, a big problem for anyone not as rich as Schwarzenegger, and for the ultra-wealthy, too, if they don't care to reach deep into their own pockets.Because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1970s that spending money on political messages is a form of free speech, there are no limits on what a candidate can spend on himself or herself; similarly the sky is the limit for backers of a political candidate or cause.
And Schwarzenegger -- like Democrat Steve Westly during the primary -- has poured millions of his own dollars into his campaign coffers, while collecting many more millions from others. So has Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, as did other candidates like failed Republican Senate hopeful Michael Huffington, failed GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon and failed Democratic candidates for governor like Al Checchi and Jane Harman.
New to California this year, however, is the "independent expenditure." There was no need for such nominally independent spending in 2002 because the Proposition 34 rules did not yet apply to candidates for governor that year. And regular election spending rules also did not apply to the 2003 recall, which put Schwarzenegger in office.
But limits are fully in force this year.
So a big new question has arisen in California politics: How independent are so-called independent expenditures, especially when they seem closely tied to the election strategy of the candidate they're backing?The just-concluded primary election season provided two prominent examples of independent spending that may not have been so independent.
First came an estimated $10 million ad campaign run by the United States Chamber of Commerce on behalf of Schwarzenegger. These so-called "issues" ads contained no content that did not extol the supposed virtues of the governor's term in office. They came when Schwarzenegger's poll ratings were at all-time lows. They juxtaposed images from the energy crunch of 2001-02 with stirring words from Schwarzenegger and claimed he had single-handedly solved both the state's budget crisis and problems with workers compensation.
The trouble is that no one is likely ever to know who provided the money for that sustained campaign. One newspaper reported that the New Majority, a Southern California Republican fund-raising group with close ties to Schwarzenegger, provided about $1 million for the ads.
But because the commercials never explicitly urged a vote for Schwarzenegger, the Chamber has no legal obligation to report where it got the money for those ads. So no one will ever know if they were bought by energy companies benefiting from Schwarzenegger's advocacy of liquefied natural gas, telephone companies benefiting from the soft consumer "bill of rights" adopted by public utilities commissioners he appointed or oil companies hoping to evade a close investigation of their windfall profits.
There was no question about the source of the funds for the springtime's other large allegedly independent expenditures. Fully $8.7 million for a series of ads promoting Democratic state Treasurer Phil Angelides came from his longtime mentor and business partner, Sacramento area developer Angelo Tsakopoulos and his daughter Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis. That money was supplemented by cash from several labor unions.
Donor identity was never in doubt here, but the independence of the ads was from the start. Not only is the Tsakopoulos family closely associated with Angelides, but there were reports the two old friends met less than two days before the first funds were contributed.
The timing of the two ad campaigns -- both coming when the candidate they aimed to benefit badly needed help -- raised doubts about how the commercials could not have been coordinated with them or their staffs. But there has been no proof of that.
The bottom line: Donation limits have not kept big money out of California politics and never will. Maybe the state should next try public financing for candidates who can't match the personal fortunes of their opponents, as one of this fall's ballot initiatives will propose. Short of that, it's hard to see how campaigning for high office will ever again be anything but a pastime for the very wealthy and their friends.
