Dough Boys: The Parties Get Phony on Finance; The Public Loses Patience with the Drug War

If you spent the week following the Senate debate over the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, you're the proverbial Better Man Than I. What's annoying is that campaign-finance reform itself is a phony posture that no incumbent sincerely wants. The consolation is that the interminable amending process the bill has provoked gives us a window into the larger phoniness of the two parties.

Exhibit A came on Tuesday when a "millionaire's amendment" to the bill passed easily. It would allow candidates faced with independently wealthy challengers to exceed established spending caps. In other words, it would protect incumbents, so it's not surprising the bill passed 70-30. But note who was on the side of the "millionaires" and who was claiming to protect the little guy from the predatory rich who want to "buy" a seat in the Senate. Republicans voted for the bill 47-3, while Democrats voted against it, 23-27. If we were to take each side at face value, it would mean that the Democrats are the party of the upper classes, and the Republicans are the party of government.

The bill actually had nothing to do with principle and everything to do with the reality that Democrats, ever concerned about hoarding campaign cash, have made it a priority over the last few election cycles to recruit limousine liberals (the limousine being self-evidently more important than the liberalism) who can run a campaign on their own nickel. This strategy culminated last year in the absurd $70 million campaign of New Jersey investment banker Jon Corzine?who, like those who become environmentalists the moment they've built their houses in the woods, voted for the bill. But the Democrats' millionaires' plan is still a going concern. Last week it became public knowledge that former White House chief of staff, the wealthy heir Erskine Bowles, had hired the Democratic pollster Geoff Garin to do focus groups to determine if it was safe to run against Jesse Helms in 2002. Most likely, Garin has spent the past weeks figuring out whether a Helms strategy that involves tying Bill Clinton around Bowles' neck will automatically sink his candidacy.

In the course of the debate, AFL-CIO head John Sweeney emerged as an unlikely defender of free speech. Sweeney told John McCain that labor would fight McCain-Feingold, since it found particularly objectionable the bill's ban on issue ads in the last 60 days of the campaign. As Joseph Schumpeter noted a half-century ago, election time is the only time the average citizen of an advanced democracy has any involvement in politics at all. To eliminate labor's ability to speak during campaign season would change not just campaign finance but politics itself?in such a way as to eliminate voter deliberation almost altogether. Much to my own surprise, I was delighted when the "paycheck-protection" amendment?which would have barred both unions and corporations from spending money on politics without the express consent of their members/shareholders?went down 69-31.

The ultimate futility of the Senate's campaign-reform efforts could be seen in this year's New Jersey governor's race, still in its early stages. According to the Newark Star-Ledger's John Hassell, Woodbridge Mayor Jim McGreevey, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has come up with an ingenious way of avoiding the state's stringent campaign-finance code. Just before Saint Patrick's Day, Irish-Americans all over New Jersey received a newspaper called the Irish Leader. It was printed by Democratic hack James J. Devine, a close associate of Ray Lesniak, the Democratic power broker of Union County. Virtually all of the ads were paid for by old McGreevey pals and campaign donors. The publication was arranged by one "Francis X. Smollon of Perth Amboy, a former shop foreman for the New York Mailers Union No. 6." Smollon wouldn't talk to Hassell; Devine said he "may not be feeling well."

In other words, it's a campaign brochure masquerading as a newspaper. All the big stories were about Jim McGreevey, including the big page-one feature, "An Irish Family Reunion," authored by McGreevey himself. It describes his trip back to the family hovel in Ballyconnell, County Cavan. "Fiercely attached to the tiny island whose people struggled unceasingly for hundreds of years for nationhood," writes McGreevey, "they carry that ideal in the core of their hearts." (Sorry, who was it again who tried to convince us the Irish could write?)

Now McGreevey's likely Republican challenger, acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco, has announced that he will take the matter to the state's Election Law Enforcement Commission. Lots of luck. Do you think the ELEC is going to want to rule on whether a newspaper is "legitimate free speech"? Is it going to get any easier at the national level, when publisher Robert Torricelli begins publishing the Voice of Italy?

ABA Dabba Doo

President Bush's announcement that he would no longer consult the American Bar Association on Supreme Court nominees was gutsy, but long overdue. The ABA has long been a sub-rosa partisan interest group?and its agenda occasionally enters the light of day, as it did five years ago when its then-president described the Republicans in Congress as a bunch of "reptilian bastards."

What has always been particularly galling was that the ABA's supporters demanded in the name of good manners that we pretend it was a nonpartisan body. It was hardly surprising that The New York Times produced a piece of spectacular illogic to mark the custom's passing: "The decision," the paper wrote, "seems wildly at odds with Mr. Bush's campaign pledge to avoid ideological litmus tests in the appointment of judges." Come again? If the ABA is, in fact, nonideological, then Bush's decision has no ideological import at all. Anyway, the ABA consultations, which began in 1952, were a custom more typical of someone else's constitution than our own?the English one, maybe. ("The Lords Jellycock, by tradition, are allowed to open the debate on Maundy Thursday"?that kind of thing.) Good riddance.

Fast Eddie

Whether it's due to Traffic or just a spontaneously generated moral renaissance, the first solid evidence that the public is losing patience with the war on drugs appeared last week in the form of a survey sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust. All of a sudden, after 15 years of telling pollsters they favor the guillotine for people who take three aspirins instead of two, Americans are evenly split (47-47) on whether "too many people are put in jail just for possessing drugs." (Just as surprisingly, the poll indicated that only 38 percent of Americans had smoked pot.) Before we break out the bong to celebrate, however, it should be noted that the same poll shows libertarian principles getting drubbed as firmly as ever. Americans disagree overwhelmingly (86-12) with the idea that "people should be allowed to take any drug they want, so long as they don't hurt someone else."

No, the American credo seems to be the reverse of that. It's "People should be able to hurt anyone they want, as long as they can blame it on drugs." A spectacular story by Ralph Vigoda and Marc Schogol in last Friday's Philadelphia Inquirer described the plight of Ed "Conscience of a Nation" Mezvinsky, whom older Americans met when, as a young Iowa congressman, he cast one of the House Judiciary Committee votes to recommend impeaching Richard Nixon in 1974. Ed was indicted on 66 counts of fraud for using Ponzi schemes to bilk associates?and his 86-year-old mother-in-law?out of $10.4 million over the course of several years. Mezvinsky allayed the suspicions of many of his victims by dropping the name of his wife, former Pennsylvania Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky.

But it wasn't Ed's fault, really. Mezvinsky's attorney, Mark Cedrone, says the 66...well, slips...were the fault of Lariam, an antimalarial drug made by Roche Pharmaceuticals, that exacerbated an underlying psychiatric disorder and "caused him to lose his ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct and resulted in much of the conduct that is laid out in the indictment." Mezvinsky took Lariam for business trips to Africa, during which he himself managed to get bilked out of $2 million investing in a Nigerian pyramid scheme. Naturally, Mezvinsky has announced he will file a lawsuit against Roche.