A Spoiler's Crusade: Senator John McCain and "the system" - campaign-finance reform

National Review, Feb 19, 2001 by Richard Lowry

McCain-Feingold would make it illegal for corporations-a category that includes most advocacy groups-and unions to engage in "electioneering communications" (ads that mention a candidate's name) within 60 days of an election. This is how incumbents, in the words of McCain's Mark Salter, hope to regain "control" of their campaigns. Also, since spending that outside groups coordinate with a candidate is subject to strict hard-money treatment, McCain-Feingold changes the rules to make it almost impossible for such groups to avoid such coordination. For instance, simply sharing professional services-"polling, media advice, fund-raising," etc., etc.-would constitute coordination.

The soft-money portions of McCain-Feingold will certainly invite constitutional challenge, since they involve a whole new swath of election regulation. But the provisions affecting independent groups drive straight into the teeth of Buckley. "As long as persons and groups eschew expenditures that in express terms advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate, they are free to spend as much as they want to promote the candidate and his views," the Court wrote in that case. Why McCain feels compelled to do this-distracting from his soft-money ban, which is the easiest sell politically-is unclear: Does he secretly crave a veto, so the "crusade," as he calls it, can go on and on? Does he want to stick it to the "shadowy" groups that ran ads against him in the primaries?

Of course, McCain has said he has a "mandate" to push campaign-finance reform to the hilt. (His aides now say he regrets that formulation.) This is an idea that relies on the pervasive misunderstanding that McCain's success in the Republican primaries somehow stemmed from, say, the "electioneering communications" provisions in McCain-Feingold. A nice expression of this mistake was a New York Times op-ed piece by William Kristol and Jeffrey Bell after Rick Lazio and Hillary Clinton inked their voluntary soft-money ban last year. They argued that conservatives would have to reconcile their disdain for campaign-finance reform with their desire to beat Hillary, since Lazio had latched on to the soft-money issue that had carried McCain to such heights.

This analysis seemed amusingly implausible at the time, but proved flatly ridiculous in light of Hillary's 12-point stomping of Lazio. The Lazio soft-money McCain-style juggernaut failed to materialize, for a couple of reasons: 1) Lazio is not a war hero with an electrifying stage presence; 2) the huddled masses of New York care less about the intricacies of election law (Lazio's message) than they do about more mundane things, like, oh, jobs upstate (Hillary's message). As pollster Andrew Kohut pointed out, even among McCain's own supporters in the Republican primaries, only a small minority cited campaign-finance reform as their foremost concern (including in New Hampshire and Michigan).

No, McCain's crusade is an idiosyncratic, not a popular one. Perhaps what drives him is the same thing that prompts him to turn his back on his colleagues at lunch. McCain is just not a party guy. Political parties are great American institutions, perhaps the most vibrant associations in the country, admirably committed, more or less, to certain principles. But they are constant checks on moral vanity, requiring their supporters to make grubby compromises and stand united with crude colleagues, in the expectation that eventually some good will come of it. But McCain, who prizes his purity above all, will have none of it, and seems to resent even the expectation that he be a team player.