Interest Groups and Campaign Finance Reform in the United States and Canada

Introduction: Interest Groups and Campaign Finance Reform—A Natural Experiment

Introduction: Interest Groups and Campaign Finance Reform—A Natural Experiment “What’s most important is that we elect a president with the proven ability to bring Democrats and Republicans together to get results so we can stand up to special interests.” —Barack Obama, November 27, 2007 “Maybe I’ve just lived a little too long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.” —Hillary Clinton, February 25, 2008 “I understand who I work for. I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you. I’ve fought to get million-dollar checks out of our elections. I’ve fought lobbyists who stole from Indian tribes. I fought crooked deals in the Pentagon. I fought tobacco companies and trial lawyers, drug companies and union bosses.” —John McCain, September 5, 2008 “Canadians replaced an agenda designed to make the government strong with a government committed to making the country strong. Conservatives heard the desire for change. We understood. And we responded. To those unrepresented by lobbyists and special interests: we hear you. To those who have longed to reform our democratic institutions: your time has come.” —Stephen Harper, January 25, 2008 The 2008 American presidential election featured two candidates who had a history of working to reduce the power of interest groups in American elections. One of Republican nominee John McCain’s landmark achievements during his twenty-two years as a senator was the passage of the Bi- partisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), also known as the McCain-Feingold Act. BCRA placed new restrictions on corporations’ and labor unions’ ability to donate to the parties and to engage in broadcast advocacy , or“electioneering,” regarding candidates for of‹ce. Although Democratic nominee Barack Obama had been in the Senate for only four years, he, too, had been active in placing new restrictions on lobbyists, and Obama touted his support for a 1998 Illinois law restricting campaign contributions from lobbyists. In principle, both Obama and McCain supported reducing the role of interest groups in campaigns. Yet the two could neither prohibit substantial spending on their behalf nor agree on any sort of joint effort to discourage groups from spending money on the 2008 election. Both denounced the activities of the “527 groups” that had played such a major role in the 2004 presidential campaign, but, as was the case in previous elections, neither could do anything about the fact that independent groups made some of the nastiest attacks on the candidates. A group calling itself the Our Country Deserves Better PAC put together an advertisement in which actors playing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro mocked Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. Democracy for America , an offshoot of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign organization , aired an advertisement speculating about the secrets in McCain’s health records. MoveOn.org parodied drug prevention public service announcements in an advertisement encouraging viewers to talk with their parents about their potential Republican sympathies and the damage those sympathies might cause. And the American Issues Project spent an estimated three million dollars on a television advertisement linking Obama to former Weather Underground member William Ayres and then further comparing the Weather Underground’s activities to the September 11 attacks. Both candidates may well have been sincere in denouncing such advertisements , but they could do little to stop these groups. Likewise, Obama could do little to stop the AFL-CIO from spending an estimated two hundred million dollars on the 2008 election, and McCain was generally powerless to stop the Chamber of Commerce, the National Ri›e Association , and other Republican-leaning groups from spending money to support him or to criticize Obama. While much of the media focus in 2008 was on the massive amounts of money spent by the candidates and the parties, interest groups were very much a part of the election.And they played such a prominent role despite the fact that BCRA was the most consequential piece of campaign ‹nance reform legislation passed in al2 | Interest Groups and Campaign Finance Reform most thirty years and despite the fact that labor unions, business associations , and many advocacy groups had fought BCRA tooth and nail on the grounds that it would limit their freedom of speech in campaigns. On...