Editor’s Note: This column appeared at some point in
2005. Here’s a preview, posted without FEC Chairman John McCain’s
permission. Read it at your own risk.
Assuming this republic continues on for some time, political
historians will look back to 2004 as the year censorship came to
America. The groundwork was laid earlier and it didn’t take quite
as well as it might have with a more servile population — not at
first, at least. But when our elected representatives and most of
the press locked arms against “negative campaigning” by nefarious
“outside groups,” we knew the jig was up and really didn’t know how
to fight it.
A prime exhibit of this game-rigging approach, saved for
posterity, is the September 20, 2004 issue of Newsweek.
Under the banner “Politics & Money,” the cover carried the
headline “THE SLIME CAMPAIGN: How Both Sides Are Using the 527
Loophole to Throw Mud and Turn Out the Vote.” Two black-and-white
low definition televisions showed a younger George W. Bush in his
cap and bomber flight jacket, and a post-Vietnam John Kerry, hair
an unruly mop, testifying before Congress. Turn the page and the
table of contents promised to explain “why it’s gotten so
mean.”
In an historic guest opinion piece, Senator John McCain — of
McCain-Feingold fame — railed against “the rise of so-called 527
groups, with their billionaire backers and nasty, negative
television ads that threaten to bring politics to a new low.” He
wrote that these groups were in violation of the law, and that the
only thing standing between the voters and cleaner, fairer
elections was the Federal Election Commission’s “despicable failure
to do its job.” Short run, McCain promised to go after 527s in
court; long run, a legislative solution: force the FEC to endorse
his evolving ever-stricter idea of what makes for a fair
campaign.
McCain was particularly incensed by a group known as the Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth, which promoted a book and paid for radio
and television ads calling into question Kerry’s heroism and
behavior during his four-month stint as a Swift boat captain during
the fracas in Indochina, as well as his antiwar advocacy after. As
McCain put it to USA Today, “I am sick and tired of
refighting the Vietnam War.”
He pressured Bush to first denounce all 527s and then,
specifically, to zero in on the much maligned Swift vets. Though
the president’s wife indicated some sympathy for what the vets were
trying to say, Bush publicly held the line that all “unregulated
soft money” should be banished from politics. One wag, setting Voltaire on his noggin, summarized Bush’s
view thus: “I approve of what you say, but I will oppose to the
death your right to say it.”
Court challenges to 527s caused a lot of grief for activists —
and dissuaded some people from speaking up — but ultimately
failed, because those groups fell within the letter of
McCain-Feingold, if not what McCain insisted was the intent of the
legislation.
Arguably, this won the election for Bush. Though left-leaning
527s outspent the pro-Bush or anti-Kerry groups by a factor of more
than five to one, the image of Kerry’s former colleagues coming
forward to cast doubt on his character and judgment had a
demoralizing effect on the senator. During the second debate, he
lent credence to the charges that he was a conspiracist by blaming
Bush for ads that the president has specifically denounced. When he
pulled out a diagram to show the links of the Swift Vets to the
Bush campaign, it was all over.
On the morning after the election, the New York Times
editorialized that this had been the vilest, most corrupt campaign
in recent memory and called the Swift Vet ads “worse than Willie
Horton.” Sensible editorial boards around the country called for
the existing finance laws to be strengthened, for the 527 loophole
to be closed. From the floor of the Senate, John McCain offered to
resign his position to head a new, stronger FEC, one that would
banish “gutter politics and anonymous attacks on the character of
the members of this fine institution” and his colleagues
overwhelmingly voted to tighten the campaign finance laws, to give
the FEC more power, and to give the regulatory body over to the
leadership of their distinguished colleague, who promised to end
“politics as we know it.”
Of course, at the time, very few people realized that the lame
duck legislation contained provisions to extend the agency’s
oversight of “electioneering communications” to include press
coverage. Those who did understand the legislation certainly didn’t
expect the Supreme Court to sanction an abridgment of such a basic
First Amendment right. And next to no one expected that McCain’s
approach would prove so unrelentingly hostile to the very
democratic values that he promised to uphold…
