By Harold Henderson
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Things campaign-finance reformers don’t want to know. Why has 20 years of campaign finance reform succeeded in many specific goals (limiting individual and PAC giving, banning corporate giving) yet failed in its main goal–ending candidates’ need to raise money by kowtowing to special interests? Because, writes Norman Ornstein in the New Republic (June 10), “Reducing the supply of money without addressing the demand for money is a recipe for disaster. In a large, diverse and cacophonous society where the costs of effective communication are rising rapidly, campaigns for political office, like campaigns for any other product, cost a lot of money….If the latest effort bans PACs, caps spending and requires that candidates raise 50 percent or more of their money in-state…it will make matters worse. Temptations to corruption will increase–hitting up business and labor officials and their families one by one to replace PAC contributions (in a fashion much less amenable to disclosure), laundering out-of-state funds into the state, finding ‘in-kind’ ways to spread the message without directly spending money….Rather than trying, quixotically, to drive money out of politics, campaign laws should create incentives for candidates to raise the right kinds of money–money from individual small donors rather than interest groups seeking influence and money that makes it easier for challengers to take on entrenched incumbents.” For instance: give individuals 100 percent tax credits for contributions up to $100 and make up the revenue by taxing PAC contributions 50 percent.
You’ve come a short way, baby. Harper’s Index (June) reports, “Number of last year’s newsweekly magazine covers featuring women who are not princesses, murderers, or models: 0.”
PC to the max. The Chicago-based biweekly In These Times (May 27) quotes Barbara Epstein, a longtime left activist and academic at University of California, Santa Cruz, on a public lecture given by Gender Trouble author Judith Butler at Berkeley a few years ago. Butler argues that the physical differences between the sexes are socially constructed and “started the lecture off by asking, is there anyone here who thinks she is a woman? Not one hand went up,” although the audience was composed almost entirely of female intellectuals. “Because they all knew enough [about Butler’s work] to know it was not hip to think you were a woman. So they knew that…anybody who put her hand up would be offering herself up for ridicule….Therefore, you get 400 people in a room, none of whom is willing to say she is a woman.”
