Clean Elections
Take the Money Out of Politics

In the sectarian world of political reform, the clean elections movement makes a sound argument for its primacy in democratic reform efforts. It says apostasy is not a precondition for radical democratic reform in the United States. Cast your vote and know it means something; but first take the private money out of political campaigns. Want a clean environment? You're not alone, millions do. Take the money out of politics and you will put the public voice back in. It is the reform that makes all others possible.

Clean Money Campaign reform is working toward 100% public financing of elections at both the state and federal level. It has become a broad-based movement with appeal across the political spectrum. But at its heart are progressive coalitions like New England's Northeast Action. Janice Fine, the Organizing Director of Northeast Action and an early architect of substantive campaign finance reform, has her finger on the pulse.

Laura Orlando's interview with Janice Fine

LO: What makes the clean elections movement different from traditional campaign finance reform efforts?

JF: The traditional approach to campaign finance reform had two core problems: one was that it treated all organizations - including Political Action Committees (PACs) - and individuals that were involved in contributing to politics the same and the other problem was that it favored incremental approaches, which just open new loopholes, to finding a solution to the problem.

The clean elections movement represents an entirely new and different strand in traditional approaches to campaign finance reform both in terms the nature of the solution but more importantly in terms of the nature of the organizations that brought it into being. It sees money, specifically the private financing of campaigns for public office, as one of the major reasons why political leaders do not reflect the positions that are held by a majority of Americans. Traditionally the groups that worked on campaign finance reform tended to extol the virtues of good government for good government sake. We see it as a really important way to achieve economic and social justice and to make it possible for the needs and views of average people to have equal standing in politics, not just those people with big wallets.

LO: Why won't solutions involving the private financing of elections work?

JF: If a baseball player slides into home plate and right before the umpire rules if he is safe or out – the player says to the umpire -- here is $1000. What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. If a lawyer was arguing a case before a judge and said, your honor before you decide on the guilt or innocence of my client, here is a $1000. What would we call that? We would call that a bribe. But if an industry lobbyist walks into the office of a key legislator and hands her or him a check for $1,000, we call that a campaign contribution. We should call it a bribe. We are challenging the whole premise that elected officials should solicit and accept contributions from private parties, period. You have got to sever the connection between private contributions and public policy.

LO: Where did the urgency for reform come from? The problem, private money in politics, has been with us for a long while.

JF: During the 1960s and 70s, a lot of people gave up on the electoral process, they basically decided it was a cesspool and should have nothing to do with it. But the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 changed all that. The lesson was that we could only ignore elections at our peril. And so a lot of organizations that previously had not put a big emphasis on electoral politics started to get into the game. So, for example, while you had trade unions who had always done some form of politics, you now had feminist groups, environmental and peace organizations, and citizen action groups that had never done electoral politics before getting involved. In New England this took the form of statewide progressive coalitions--beginning in Connecticut in 1981, and then spreading to Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, where constituencies came together to run progressives for office and to try to pass and pursue progressive policy.

LO: The work Northeast Action and others have done in New England have made it a regional leader in Clean Money Campaign reform. Why was Maine the first target for a clean elections law?

JF: We worked intensively in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. But the state that got out front the fastest was Maine.

In 1992 - working with the statewide progressive coalition in Maine, the Dirigo Alliance - we brought to the table a wide variety of organizations, including the best of the good government groups, like the League of Women Voters and Common Cause; the AFL-CIO; the largest environmental group in Maine; lesbian and gay organizations; feminist organizations; peace organizations; the Maine People's Alliance; and the AARP. We literally wrote a law together by committee.

We also had to raise a lot of money. In Maine we raised $500,000 and in Massachusetts -- where we passed a clean elections law in 1998 -- we raised $1.3 million. We asked potential contributors to "give us the campaign contribution to end all campaign contributions." We had pollsters, focus groups, and we made and ran TV commercials. We were very committed to accepting the world as it is and not as it should be and understanding that if we wanted to win this we had to have a very compelling message and enough money to get that message out.

In Maine something that was really inspiring was that there was a tradition that had been pioneered by environmental and peace organizations to try to get all of the signatures necessary to put something on the ballot in one day. And so we asked all the different organizations that were endorsing this to either call their members or to give their membership list to a central phone bank. Six months before the election, we hired organizers to recruit volunteers to gather signatures. In November 1995, we gathered all of the signatures that we needed in a single day; 1100 volunteers collected 65,000 signatures in 14 hours.

On election day, in November 1996, we won by 56%. A new national organization was launched in the wake of this victory, called Public Campaign. Activists and coalitions in 40 states are working to advance Clean Money Campaign reform. It's the law in Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont and Arizona. It will be on the ballot in two more states this fall and has the potential to pass in as many as six in the next 2-3 years. It was the Maine victory that sent a message nationwide to reformers that Clean Money was winnable and not a pipe dream.

Laura Orlando
Editor

Janice Fine is the Organizing Director of Northeast Action, a doctoral candidate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a recipient of an Open Society Institute individual fellowship.

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