Molly Ivins October 17NEW YORK — Woe betide those who use our dandy new twin-set scandals for partisan political purposes. Thou shalt not use them to dumpeth upon President Clinton, and neither shalt thou speaketh evil of BobDole (although you could wish a plague on both their infested houses). If thou doth transgress, the vengeful Lord of Clean Politics will never forgive you. Now is the time, friends, foes and utterly indifferent citizens — this is the chance to clean up our political system. If ever the Great Campaign Manager in the Sky were trying to draw our attention to the root of the rot in American politics, it is right this very minute. Every newspaper in the country twinned the stories Tuesday: An Indonesian couple laid $425,000 on the Democratic Party, which may not be illegal, but it sure as sin is unseemly. Meanwhile, BobDole (R-Archer-Daniels-Midland) was having his nose rubbed in the fact that ADM execs have donated more than $200,000 to his campaigns over the years, this well-known fact being unusually newsworthy in that ADM has just admitted to two price-fixing scams and has been fined $100 million. What might have been the Indonesians' motive? Simple gratitude for a Clinton get-well card, says an executive quoted by The Wall Street Journal, but another possibility is influence over this country's policy on the rebellion in East Timor. (The situation in East Timor is a horrifying, long-running human-rights violation; two heroes of that agony have just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.) The couple have ties to the Lippo Group, which is into banking, insurance and real estate, so the possibilities for financial favors are also legion. On the other hand, what ADM has gotten from BobDole over the years is shiningly clear. ADM is one of the chief beneficiaries of corporate welfare in this country. According to The Washington Post, "Dole has championed ADM's interests in Congress and the executive branch. He has acted many times to preserve tax breaks for, or block competitive products of, the corn-fed ethanol fuel industry that ADM controls. Dole has worked, too, to preserve the price subsidy for the American sugar industry, which helped ADM." The ethanol subsidy alone that ADM gets from the government was worth $375 million to the company in 1995. Do we really think the Justice Department under a Dole administration would have gone after ADM on the price-fixing charges? Do we really think that a Dole Justice Department would have slapped a $100 million fine on this company, whose motto, according to their ex-exec Mark Whitacre, is "The competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy"? (Ain't free enterprise grand?) This is your wake-up call! The government is being bought out from underneath us through legal bribes called campaign contributions.
Anyone who gives one single faint flip about this country should never give another nickel to any candidate or political party; all contributions should go to Common Cause or any other campaign reform group to build pressure to fix this system. Or, if you're really partisan, you could split the donation between the party and Common Cause. I guarantee that it is in nobody's long-term interest to have this open corruption continue. The people who can afford to buy access and favors now aren't going to be any happier than anyone else when the whole system collapses. Of course, we can buy campaign finance reform. If we put one-fifth of the money into an advertising and public-relations campaign for public financing of political campaigns that was spent to defeat universal health-care coverage (a sum believed to be around $25 million), we would get campaign finance reform passed the next time Congress meets. As to the cynics who say we'll never get the money out of politics, I say try public campaign financing. The Supreme Court made public campaign financing infinitely more difficult with its meatheaded 1988 decision that rich people and special-interest money have a First Amendment right to undue influence in this society. In a recent edition of The New York Review of Books, Ronald Dworkin makes the contrary case. In fact, it is the First Amendment right of most citizens to have a say in their own government that is being irreparably damaged. I believe it was Gore Vidal who first suggested this simple formula to control campaign costs: "No candidate for public office shall be permitted to buy either time or space in any news medium. Compensatory time and space shall be provided by the media." For starters, I suggest that Clinton and Dole agree now to appoint a commission, including Bill Bradley, Warren Rudman and Fred Wertheimer (former president of Common Cause), to study how the European democracies handle this question and to make recommendations. As it says in the hymn, God is watching. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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