The great puritan is at it again. John McCain calls himself a crusader; he has the attitude to match. He wants nothing less than to purify the nation and drive out evil. The evil is money in politics, of course, and he will slay it with campaign-finance reform. His panacea is to ban the soft-money contributions that corporations, unions and others give to political parties for use in campaigns.
McCain's motives are admirable. It is his reason that is in question. The McCain-Feingold bill is based on a fundamental misconception: the notion that on every issue there is some abstract public interest--some objective, Platonic embodiment of the public good--and that this is thwarted by the influence of private interests. The premise is that private interests, pejoratively called "special interests," are bad. Are they? You might support the Sierra Club or the Arctic oil drillers. But can both be acting against the public interest? You might be for Sarah Brady or for the NRA. Do you believe both are subverting the public good?
The American political tradition does not believe in such abstractions. The American idea is that the public interest does not arise from the ether and alight upon the shoulder of some wise Senator pulling his chin. It is defined by the rough clash of voices and forces and, yes, interests. Contrary to McCain, these clashing interests are good. The American idea has never been to suppress them but to pit them against each other and allow them to proliferate. The more they proliferate, the more they check and balance each other. Coal fights natural gas. Napster fights the record industry. Nader fights everybody. No one interest becomes paramount.
McCain-Feingold would shackle private interests by severely restricting their ability to express themselves politically. There are few more important or more cherished ways for those outside the political system to express themselves than by contributing to a political party that reflects their views. McCain-Feingold seeks to stamp that out. What would the bill do if it became law? Abolish influence peddling? Hardly. It would simply shift influence away from the inarticulate groups that today must buy media time or support political parties to participate in politics, and radically increase the influence of those already at the crossroads of information--journalists, broadcasters, media owners and incumbent politicians.
One provision puts severe restrictions on the political ads that outside groups can run in the month or two before an election, precisely when political speech is most important. It is hard to think of a more frontal assault on the First Amendment. The First Amendment may not have been intended, as some believe, to protect only political speech, but protecting political speech was surely its fundamental intent--an intent grotesquely violated by restricting political advertising at the height of campaigns.