The Need For Campaign Reform (Guest Voice)

This Guest Voice post is by CBS veteran newsman and anchor Bob Schieffer. In this excerpt from his new book, Bob Schieffer’s America, he looks at the issue of campaign reform and the realities facing those who seek it.

From Bob Schieffer’s America

by Bob Schieffer:

Campaign 2004 cost nearly a billion dollars. In 2008, spending in just the presidential race alone will surpass that figure. Bill Clinton had amassed a campaign war chest of $3 million when he ran in the New Hampshire primary in 1996. His wife had collected a staggering $90 million before New Hampshire rolled around in 2008.

Money was always a part of politics, but it has become the overriding factor in modern campaigns.

No candidate, no matter how brilliant or charismatic, can get elected without the money to buy campaign commercials. Only those who are willing to spend a major part of every day asking others for money can even hope to be elected. Since a vast majority of the American people wouldn’t even think of spending their days that way, we have come to see a different kind of person run for office, people who are willing to do just that. They are not bad people to be sure, some of them are very good people, but they are more akin to development officers and professional fund-raisers than those who sought office in the past, and with the new breed has come new values and new goals.

In 2004, the average winning Senate campaign cost $7 million, which meant the candidate had to raise $3,196.35 every day including Saturday and Sunday of his or her six year term. Ask a retired politician why he or she decided to get out of politics, and most of them will tell you they just couldn’t take another day of relentless fund-raising. Others may tell you they just got offers to make more money. The influx of money into the system has made public office a stepping-stone to wealth. Candidates find they can make more money and exercise more influence lobbying than they ever did as congressional representatives or senators.

Will it ever change? If it does, change won’t come easily.

The hardest laws to write are the laws regulating campaign finance. It’s difficult to limit campaign spending without running afoul of every American’s right to free speech.

But there is another reason: campaign laws are the only laws written by those who are being regulated – the politicians themselves. No politician or political party can be objective about such laws, one party or the other always holds a majority, and the majority always tries to write the laws to favor its side. Every Congress that I have covered since I came to Washington in 1969 has tried some kind of reform or at least paid lip service to it, as has every administration. Yet every election has cost more than the previous one. Politicians have become addicted to money in the way hardened drug-users become addicted to heroin or cocaine. They want to break the habit and they hate raising money, but they’re afraid that if they don’t, someone else will and they’ll get beat.

In order to get elected, politicians must sign off with so many special interest groups before they come to Washington that once here, their positions are set in stone, they are unable to compromise, and without compromise legislative bodies grind to a halt.

True reform can only come from the grass roots, and only when voters come to realize the current system has produced a government that can nibble around the edges of major issues but is incapable of confronting major problems head-on.

Real campaign finance reform will never originate in Washington. There is just too much money involved.

In a capital where some things change and others don’t, the impact of money on politics has had a remarkable consistency. Every year it just gets worse.