It’s another sad week, a gunman entered a Florida High School and killed 17 people. As usual the NRA and it’s bought politicians are blaming everything but our gun laws, and the NRA is doubling-down on ridiculous arguments for things like increased weapons in our schools. The problem, as always, is money. To run a political campaign, especially for Federal office, is quite expensive and the rewards for gaining office are quite lucrative. This is a tough cookie to crack, but I think it is doable with Campaign Finance/Advertising Reform and Term Limits on elected Federal positions. This article will only discuss what I think should be done for Federal positions, or those with the ability to impact the most American Citizens. I would hope that State and Local policies would evolve to match in time, but basically leave that stuff up to local leaders.
NOTE: I’ve already penned my thoughts on Gun Control in this previous article and will not reiterate them here. This article is about steps we can take as a nation to implement lasting change.
Campaigns are expensive, all of those hurtful and mean TV Ads, Radio Ads, Social Media postings that annoy the shit out of you during election season cost money to make and distribute. So politicians take money wherever they can get it, and become beholden to those that give them money (lest the well of money dry up). The result is that moderately conservative politicians end up becoming (or at least voting) more conservative than they may be in real life to appease their donors. The same holds true for moderate liberals, who end up voting more extremely liberal to appease their donors. It’s a vicious cycle, one that has gotten much, much worse in the past 10-years or so resulting in a stronger partisan split than I can recall in my nearly 40-year life. The only way I can think of to get money out of politics is to have the government allot a fixed amount of money to candidates and provide equal air/radio time to all candidates as part of a large Campaign Finance and Advertising Reform initiative.
The biggest expense, as I understand it, in a campaign is broadcast advertisements. A possible solution that I have is for all candidates to be given an allotment of TV and Radio time by the government to run their ads. This would be given equally to all candidates for a particular role (ie: all senate candidates in a region get the same air time). This could be managed by the FCC who oversees the broadcast media. I would love to see these included as part of a Campaign Finance and Advertising Reform initiative:
- Advertisements are limited to the 12-weeks prior to the election (no more multi-year campaigns!)
- All candidates are given equal airtime (example: 1 Ad per-hour on each ad-supported TV and Radio channel in the candidate’s district)
- Ads may only discuss the candidate they are sponsoring
- Ads may not mention or use any recorded likeness (video, image, audio, quotations, text) of competing candidates
- Any ads paid for privately (PACs, SuperPACs, etc.) may not mention any candidate, only specific issues they would like viewers to think about. (ie: a liberal PAC may run ads promoting universal healthcare, but cannot name any specific candidate. Alternately a conservative PAC may run ads promoting family values, but cannot name any candidate)
Certainly there are other expenses of a campaign, especially staff costs. To cover those costs I propose that all candidates that have received enough petition signatures from voters in their district get a standardized stipend depending on the office they are seeking (ie: Federal Senators would need to cover a larger area and therefore incur more costs than a Federal Representative in the same state, so the stipend for the senator’s campaign should be larger than the representatives.). This levels the playing field for all candidates, and removes the need for fundraising activities which are very time consuming for candidates, and often results in them being beholden to interests other than their potential constituents… (Does anybody else hate the fact that our elected representatives spend almost a year campaigning/fundraising and not doing their job?). These reforms to finance and advertising will go a long way towards eliminating the financial burden of a campaign that results in strong corporate interests that may not align with citizen interests, and will help ensure our elected officials are thinking of the correct people when they make decisions.
The other thing I would like to see is a reduction in Career Politicians through term limits (ex. 2-terms for U.S. Senate, 3-terms for U.S. House of Representatives). I laud the desire of any citizen to run for elected office and serve, but I don’t believe that should your lifelong career, at least not at the Federal level. I do believe the adage that Power Corrupts, and therefore believe in limiting the opportunity for that corruption to occur. After serving your time, get out of the way for some fresh ideas to come in, perhaps take all that federal experience and go back to helping at the local level. Nobody gets more enthusiastic and open to new ideas as they get older, quite the opposite. People tend to get comfortable, resistant to change as they get older. So why is it that our government is dominated by senior citizens? The byproduct of long-term career politicians is increased donations from parties such as the NRA as they can be confident that their dollars will give them many years of return. Do you think the NRA would give as much to a candidate limited to 2 or 3 terms? I don’t. Even if it doesn’t curb the spending of groups like the NRA, it still gives citizens the opportunity to get fresh new perspectives into our government on an increased frequency, lessening the duration of NRA dollars spent on candidates.
The other byproduct I hope to see from the implementation of Campaign Finance and Advertising Reform along with Federal Term Limits is the freedom for a candidate to be more moderate and break from extreme party beliefs, and even the possibility for more independent candidates to run successful campaigns. Today’s two big political parties contribute so much money to a campaign that a candidate must toe the party line, even if they may not feel that strongly about an issue. There is no doubt in my mind that the Two Party system does not work in the favor of The People, and I believe these changes would allow U.S. Citizens to make meaningful improvements to our government, and ensure our government better serves us, not itself. So get involved, make your elected officials aware that these are important to you, and in the future, vote for candidates that share these same values.
synapsethemole 
You must be logged in to post a comment.