REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Potemkin Convention
Kerry's nomination gambit makes a mockery of campaign finance "reform."
Thank you, John Kerry. The news that the Massachusetts Senator may delay accepting the Presidential nomination until several weeks beyond the Democratic Party's late-July Boston convention exposes two truths that the political class hates to admit.
The first is that the party conventions are now little more than free advertising vehicles. They long ago lost all political drama, but this year one of them may not even nominate a candidate. The next step would be for the media finally to agree not to cover them, though we probably won't because these week-long affairs have also become the equivalent of cardiologist conventions for the political press. We get to see old friends and eat well on expense accounts.
Even better, this Kerry trial balloon exposes campaign-finance limits as a monumental farce. The Kerry camp is considering this maneuver so it can keep raising and spending money as long as possible without having to abide by spending limits that kick in once a party formally nominates its candidate.
Of course, the late July date was the Democratic Party's own choice--and it was selected precisely so it would let the nominee accept matching federal campaign funds a month earlier than President Bush, who will be nominated in late August. The assumption had been that the Democratic candidate would have run out of cash by this summer, but Mr. Kerry has been raising more money than he expected. In other words, Mr. Kerry embraced the rules when they helped him but now wants to ignore them when they don't.
This is always the way with campaign-finance limits. Politicians endorse them to sound holier-than-thou but then immediately turn around and exploit or invent loopholes and exceptions. No sooner had the McCain-Feingold reform that was supposed to ban big-dollar contributions become law last year than such billionaire reform supporters as George Soros were pouring cash into the loophole spending vehicle known as "527s."
This spectacle has become gross enough that some of the reform cheerleaders in the press corps may finally be catching on. In a column last week, even David Broder of the Washington Post sounded disillusioned. "Once again, unanticipated consequences of new rules are largely subverting their intended purposes," he wrote. "It is virtually impossible to control the flow of money from the private sector into the political world." Now he tells us.
