The deed is done. John McCain, having been a participant in the presidential public financing system for eight months, has now declined the money for which he qualified, and declared himself free to spend an unlimited amount of private money between now and the convention, much of which will effectively be used to fight the general election. The great reformer has effectively managed to have it both ways, having the money available to repay a loan if his campaign didn't take off in New Hampshire, but being able to avoid the limits if it did.
None of this should surprise anyone who has watched McCain's career on campaign finance reform, the issue that has most clearly defined him as the rightful conductor of the Straight Talk Express. On this issue as well as those identified by Paul Waldman today, he has adopted the pose of a "maverick" exclusively when it suited him and dropped those positions when they involved actual political risk.
McCain's Arizona in 1998 became the second state to adopt a system of voluntary full public financing for all state elections. It has been probably the most successful such system in the country over the decade, and Janet Napolitano is the only governor yet who who has won election under such a system, which eschews all private money except $10 qualifying contributions. It has growing public support, including among prominent Republicans.
One of those supporters was Senator McCain. Here's what he told Bill Moyers in 2002:
BILL MOYERS: Senator, in your home state of
, a number of candidates recently were elected to office running with public funding, public financing. Would you support it? Would you endorse, what do you think about that experiment there? Arizona SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: I think it’s good overall. I think it needs to, like any other new experiment, it needs to have some wrinkles taken out of it. But we had more people run for public office than any time in the history of our state, and that’s what it was all about. As I say, there’s some fixes that need to be made, but it was a new experiment, and overall I think was very successful and interestingly the ones who are running, you know what they’re telling me? They said, surprise, surprise, I spend my time talking to voters not to contributors.
BILL MOYERS: Do you think that could become a model for the nation as a whole? SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: Absolutely.
McCain even taped a public service announcement in support of the system that year, in which he said, " "Clean Elections works well to overcome the influence of special interests and gives Arizonans the power to create good government." The ad was intended as a shot across the bow of an effort to repeal the law, which fizzled.
But when the "model for the nation as a whole" was actually introduced as legislation, the maverick was building a campaign machine run by lobbyists, for whom anything that would "overcome the influence of special interests" is anathema. When a reporter from The Hill asked him whether he would support Sen. Dick Durbin's federal "Fair Elections Now Act," modeled directly on Arizona, "McCain dismissed the proposal yesterday with a flat 'no.'”Last year, Jacob Soberoff of the election-reform group Why Tuesday asked McCain on tape:
Q: You got clean elections in
, do you want to see that on a national level? Arizona McCain: Ahhhh, you mean the –
Q: Public financing?
McCain: No, I don’t think that’s what we want to do. I think we ought to let the BCRA see how it plays out first, but I’m very worried about the 527s.
I've been following this for a few years, and I've never seen any indication that McCain has ever expressed any substantive reason for changing his mind about full public financing, which has become if anything more popular and more successful since the Moyers' show and the PSA. Rather, like the presidential public funds, he was for it when it worked for him, against it when it didn't.
-- Mark Schmitt
