JB

Many progressives are distressed that Howard Dean has chosen to forgo matching funds for the primary season, believing that it heralds the death of campaign finance regulation. I am somewhat less concerned.

There are three basic reasons to restrict campaign finance. The first is that you don't want elections decided simply by who raises more money so that the policy differences between the candidates become essentially irrelevant to determining who wins. The second is that you are worried that the drive to raise funds will produce an arms race that will divert representatives from governing because it will force them to spend more and more time raising funds and cuddling up to wealthy donors. Third, you are worried that there will be corruption or at least the appearance of corrpution-- Even if large donations do not result in quid pro quos, they do help secure access to the candidate and thus predispose candidates toward the interests of the very rich and powerful.

Raising funds through the Internet, which the Dean campaign has pioneered, changes the picture somewhat. The Internet makes it possible to raise lots of money in relatively small sums from a very large number of people. That means that an increasing percentage of a campaign's money comes from small scale Internet donations. Then the second concern is reduced because it takes less of the candidate's time to raise money. Rather, the candidate needs a better infrastructure to organize and deliver contributions. He or she can spend more time campaigning rather than courting individual donors because campaigning reaches a broader audience and thus produces more funds. The third concern is reduced because the distribution of contributions is flatter. That means that there are fewer people who can genuinely claim the right to specialized access, which tends to lessen the problem of corruption or the appearance thereof. And, I would argue, the first concern is somewhat reduced because the ability to raise funds is more genuinely correlated with popular support. The candidate who raises the most money is the candidate who can energize the most people to support him or her financially.

Is Internet financing of campaigns a panacea? No, not by a long shot. But we can hope that Dean's Internet model eventually comes to dominate the model that President Bush has adopted, which relies on contributions from wealthy individuals whom the President has rewarded with very large tax breaks. When you think about it, the President and his donor base have been engaged in a not very subtle quid pro quo: He lowers tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, and they, in turn, do their best to get him elected. Bush's strategy raises all three of the concerns mentioned above-- money displacing votes, the arms race, and the danger of corruption-- much more than the Internet model.

So there is reason to be glad about what Dean is doing. If he demonstrates that his model works, and and if both major parties turn to the Internet and to a broad base of smaller contributions as the best way to finance a campaign, we will ameliorate the influence of money on politics. That is not because there will be less money in the system, but because it will be raised and delivered to the candidates in ways less corrosive of the democratic process. There is still much more that we could do: for example, we could make candidates less dependent on fundraising by creating a bank of media time distributed to candidates for public office. In any case, the campaign finance system in this country is badly broken; we need to think how to make it work for democracy rather than against it.

JB

Howard Dean is getting lambasted for remarks he's made about gun control and the Confederate flag recently. On Saturday he said that he wanted to be "the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks."

But to me, at least, an earlier Dean remark is much more important. Speaking in South Carolina on February 13, Dean remarked: "There's no reason why white guys who have a Confederate flag in the back of their pickup truck shouldn't be walking side-by-side with blacks, because they don't have health insurance, either."

For some time now, the Republican Party has successfully taken a two-track approach to cultural and economic politics, pushing populist appeals on social issues while promoting economic policies that benefit largely the well-to-do, defending the latter on the grounds that a rising tide will lift all boats. Democrats, on the other hand, have long stood for economic policies that, I believe, are more in the interests of poor and working class Americans. Republican cultural appeals on issues like abortion, the flag, gun control, feminism, homosexuality and affirmative action have sought to prevent a multiracial coalition of working class Americans from forming; they have repeatedly pulled white working class voters, and particularly white working class men, away from the Democrats. Simultaneously, the Republican party has tried to cast the Democrats as the party of elitist snobs out of touch with mainstream values. I have always believed that such accusations are deeply unfair: it is clear from the last Presidential election that the vast majority of the people who vote Democrat are middle class and working class people. Nevertheless, the accusation of cultural elitism has been extremely valuable for the Republican Party's electoral chances. Perhaps in the long run the Democrats may win the fight over values, but in the short run they will lose a lot of elections.

Dean's statement about forming a coalition of whites and blacks who have similar interests in health care, reflects, I think, a perfectly sensible approach. The Democrats should be a more populist party, focusing on *both* the interests and the values of working class and middle class Americans. That means that liberal Democrats will have to compromise on cultural issues that part of the party's liberal base thinks important.

Many people don't trust the Democrats because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the Democrats want to take away their guns. I remember a billboard in Texas during the presidential election in 1988, with a quote from Michael Dukakis saying that he just didn't believe that people should own guns. It is that kind of message that turns large numbers of Americans off the Democratic Party.

The reason is that the gun control question is about much more than the specific issue of gun regulation. It is a cultural indicator or cultural signal-- one of a small number of highly resonant cultural symbols that people use to ascertain a person's larger set of values and commitments. The Republican Party has understood and manipulated this feature of human psychology particularly well since 1968, deliberately choosing appeals on a key set of issues that allow many Americans to feel that the Republican party stands for their values, even if Republican candidates by and large are not working in their economic interests.

Speaking as a liberal Democrat, I would much rather compromise on what is in practice a largely symbolic issue like gun control than on economic issues that hit ordinary people where they live. (It is largely symbolic because the only laws that can be passed at the national level will have only minor effects in combating the misuse of guns while distinguishing these cases from the appropriate use of guns by law abiding citizens.).

I would rather that the Democratic party be more populist than it currently is. Let me be clear: I don't particularly like Dean's way of exemplifying the working class Americans he wants to appeal to: the Confederate Flag, after all, reemerged into popular consciousness as a symbol of massive resistance to Brown in the 1950's and 1960's. But I do think that it is important to show people who have a gun rack on their pickup trucks-- to change the metaphor-- that the Democratic Party is working in their interests. In my view, the elitists that people should be worried about are not cultural elitists but economic elitists, people who want to grab everything and leave ordinary Americans to fend for themselves. The Democratic Party will do much better if it compromises on a few cultural issues like gun control while promoting the economic issues that more Americans can identify with.

It is already quite clear to me that the Republicans would like to fight the 2004 election on cultural issues like patriotism, guns, and the flag, and they will try to paint the Democratic nominee, whoever he or she may be, as elitist and dangerously out of touch with mainstream American values. Dean's views on gun control will help counteract that strategy. One must combat a serious misunderstanding here: It is not a simple either-or choice between maintaining egalitarian and progressive values on the one hand, or surrendering to the conservative Republican cultural agenda on the other. The Republican cultural agenda is not a natural collection of positions that logically go together; it was carefully selected and honed to create a winning political coalition and split the Democratic coalition apart. Thus, the strategy for the Democrats is to find a different combination of positions, some liberal, some moderate, that appeal to the values as well as the economic interests of more Americans. Dean's more moderate approach on gun control may not by the only way to do that, but it is certainly one way.