He considered not accepting–formally, in so many words–his party’s nomination at its Boston convention. Here is why he considered doing that, and why it is too bad he flinched.
From the moment each candidate accepts his nomination, until Election Day, he can spend only the $75 million in public funds he is allotted. But the Democrats’ convention is five weeks earlier than the Republicans’, so Bush has five extra weeks to hoard his $75 million and spend his privately raised contributions. Hence Kerry’s idea: officially accept the nomination later–perhaps five weeks later.
Instead, he will do the conventional thing, thereby sacrificing healthy politics on the altar of the superstition that money in politics is inherently unhealthy. Granted, in the past he has supported this superstition with the reformers’ blend of sanctimony and cynicism. When the McCain-Feingold reform was debated, Kerry delivered the usual bromides about there being “too much” money in politics. That was before he discovered that he could raise, as he recently did, more than $1 million a day ($89 million in 80 days).
Reformers believe that government has the right to stipulate how much money can be spent to finance political advocacy. Reformers regard political participation through campaign contributions as a “problem.” Actually, this year’s large increase in political giving–to parties and groups that support them–is wholesome.
Campaign reformers are constantly surprised and saddened by what they call “unanticipated” consequences of their handiwork. But only they are too obtuse to anticipate what others proclaim–that money diverted from flowing to parties and campaigns would flow into politics in other ways.
Bush’s re-election team swallowed lousy advice from lawyers who insisted that the activities of the nonparty groups now raising and spending unlimited contributions to support Kerry–groups known as 527s because of the pertinent provision in the tax code–had been banned under McCain-Feingold. Fortunately, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) did not conclude that the 527s violate silly McCain-Feingold rules governing political speech. So Republicans are playing catch-up.
In 2000 Bush said he considered the McCain-Feingold attack on political participation through contributions unconstitutional. Two years later he traduced the First Amendment by signing into law that expansion of government regulation of what can be spent to finance speech about government.
He expected that his party would maintain its advantage in raising the kind of contributions that the law specifically allows. And he expected that the Democratic Party, which has had an advantage in raising the kind of large contributions the new law severely limits, would suffer.
Liberals methodically formed 527s independent of the Democratic Party to raise and spend money for issue advertising–political speech. Republicans serenely sat back, believing their lawyers’ assurances that these groups were outlawed. The disgraceful Republican argument to the FEC was that the Democratic 527s are a criminal conspiracy on a Watergate scale. The noisy 527s are about as conspiratorial as calliopes. And now the Republican Party formally favors more government restraint of political advocacy than the Democratic Party favors.
Republicans expressed self-serving and synthetic indignation over Kerry’s flirtation with the idea of delayed acceptance of the nomination. And reformers said, with sincere but misguided alarm, that Kerry’s contemplated ploy would make the convention a sham. They also said that the networks would be reluctant to cover it, and that if the nomination were not formally conferred in Boston, the convention would not properly be entitled to the $14 million taxpayer subsidy.
But such subsidies for conventions, voted by the political class for its own convenience, are indefensible in any case. Regarding network coverage of the parties’ four-day political advertisements for themselves: for the peculiar few who want to watch, God created cable.
As for the convention’s becoming a sham, there has not been a second ballot at a convention since 1952, when Democrats needed three to tidy up the nomination of Adlai Stevenson. Because of the proliferation of primaries, conventions no longer make decisions, they merely ratify decisions made much earlier.
Not until 1932 did a nominee, FDR, show up at a convention, in Chicago. Seventy-two years earlier, downstate in Springfield, Lincoln waited four days before accepting the nomination that had been formally tendered by a delegation in his parlor after it had been voted in Chicago. Four days, five weeks–who cares?
