Election Funds Raise Red Flags

Congratulations to backers of public campaign financing in Connecticut. The state Elections Enforcement Commission has declared the first election cycle under the new system an “unqualified success.” Please move on. There’s nothing more to see here because the ultimate goal of any new government program is self-perpetuation.

The predictable rosy assessment of the new program presupposes that you think it’s a good idea to use public money to fund political campaigns. Many people do not, but right now opponents of wasting taxpayer funds on campaigns are on the wrong side of Connecticut political vogue.

It should be noted that there are some who argue that the Citizen’s Election Fund is not paid for by taxpayers because the money comes from the sale of abandoned property in the custody of the state. This argument suggests that there are assets and pots of money the state holds that do not belong to the people. It also brings into question why it’s called the “Citizens” Election Fund and not the “Some Extra Cash We Got Through Confiscation Fund.”

It is estimated that the state distributed about $10 million of your money to legislative candidates in the recent election. Some of the money went to candidates with no opponent. Some undoubtedly went to candidates you don’t agree with and would never vote for.

Worth Questioning

In the context of an $18 billion budget, $10 million is not a lot, but it’s worth questioning. The truth is, if the money were not being used to pay for election campaigns, Gov. M. Jodi Rell and legislative leaders would be using it to try to balance the budget, which is currently hundreds of millions of dollars in the red. They might even hold a news conference standing in front of the unclaimed property to show how smart they are by selling it to keep our taxes down.

For opponents of the new system, it’s not the dollars involved, it’s the principle. At a time when the state is facing severe deficit, when important social programs are under-funded, when roads and bridges are structurally deficient — is it really in the public interest to use public money to pay for campaign spending that is, by definition, wasteful when compared to its other legitimate uses?

The answer is “no,” but few politicians are willing to say so out loud. It is more expedient to say the system guarantees clean elections, free of the influence of special interests. Nothing could be further from the ftruth. Laying aside the debate over what constitutes a special interest — as opposed to a regular one — there is no evidence the new system has removed those interests from our government. And that’s the goal of public financing; remove special interests from policy making by eliminating special interest money from elections.

Lobbyist Spending Rising

If we measure the influence of special interests by the number of registered lobbyists working the halls of the state Capitol, and by how much clients spend on them, those figures only increase every year. Public financing — with respect to its primary goal — is not an unqualified success. It hasn’t and it won’t make a dent.

Ironically, at the federal level, this year’s candidate of change, Barack Obama may have killed public financing in presidential campaigns. His success cultivating large and small donors, helped him to dramatically outspend and crush the father of federal public financing — John McCain.

Will his administration be corrupted by the influence of special interests? Only if he allows it and only if you consider as corrupt the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans who supported his campaign with their hard earned money, on their own terms.

Dean Pagani is a former gubernatorial advisor. He is V.P. of Public Affairs for Cashman and Katz Integrated Communications in Glastonbury.