IF THE ISSUE had been on the ballot two weeks ago, it is likely that a majority of Kansans would gladly have voted in favor of reining in campaign spending and requiring candidate and issue advertising to make clear just who was paying for it.
After a long, loud and often muddy campaign, people were sick to death of television and radio ads, mass mailings and computerized phone calls that relied on half-truths and innuendo to attempt to sway their votes. The broadcast ads, which in volume and persistence rivaled used-car commercials, increased in frequency and volume in the last week of the campaign.
Who paid for those ads? That’s going to take awhile to sort out. Money collected and spent by Kansas candidates and political action in the last few days of the campaign (this year, the last 12 days) will not be reported until Jan. 10, 2007. Even then, the money flow will not be transparent, because political action committees are not required to say which candidates they spent their money on.
The Kansas Ethics Commission wants to make some changes in state law to make politicians and the people who pay for their campaigns more accountable. The commission thinks political action committees should be required to identify the candidates they give money to; that contributions of more than $50 in the 11 days before elections should be reported quickly; and that “issue-advocacy” organizations should be required to report who is paying for their advertising and how much they are spending.
In Missouri, which had an even more bruising campaign season than Kansas, the attorney general is proposing adding uninvited political calls to the state no-call law. Kansas Attorney General-elect Paul Morrison said the idea is worth considering.
Any of these proposals would help civilize the increasingly barbaric political culture. All of them combined might help reduce public disgust with the political process — a disgust that fuels cynicism about government in general.
But nothing can be done about any of these proposals until the Legislature meets in January. By then, perhaps, the memory of the last few weeks of the 2006 campaign will have faded and the matter will seem less than urgent.
It is up to the voters to keep their indignation alive and to let their lawmakers know that campaign-finance reform is important to the people of Kansas.
Any day now, the 2008 campaigns will begin. Without meaningful changes in the law, the political process will just get worse.