For twenty years the campaign finance reform movement has been dominated by activists in pinstripe suits and power dresses: Democracy 21’s Fred Wertheimer, Public Campaign’s Ellen Miller and others. Suddenly, in the last year, a new group of reformers has surfaced. Unlike their more conventional brethren, these activists are taking campaign finance reform to the streets. They’re getting themselves arrested, marching and creating mayhem. Chicago 1968? No. But something’s happening.
Some highlights. A year ago January ninety-year-old Doris Haddock — aka "Granny D." — began a cross-country trek by foot from California to Washington, D.C. In October activists conducted a demonstration at the U.S. Capitol rotunda; nine people were arrested. In January, in the second wave of a planned series of protests at the rotunda, another six were arrested.
The most impressive protest of all took place in Boston in November where 15 activists took over Governor Paul Cellucci’s office while another 150 surrounded him at a statehouse event. Cellucci had indicated he planned to veto legislation providing for the public funding of elections, which voters had endorsed in a state referendum. But following his encounter with the activists, who passionately rebutted his arguments against reform, he decided to reverse course and keep campaign finance reform alive.
"I don’t know if I would call what is going on in this country on this issue a movement yet," says Janice Fine, one of the reformers who took over the governor’s office. "But I think we are closer to realizing that than we ever were before."
Campaign finance reform is changing attracting a different breed. Janice Fine, who is celebrated by activists for a famous slogan — "Americans don’t believe that having a lot of money should entitle you to a second helping of democracy" — was six months pregnant at the time of the sit-in at the governor’s office.
Ronnie Dugger’s Call to Action
The protests are dominated by veterans of previous social causes. The movement is attracting people like Randy Kehler, Granny D. and the Reverend Harry Kiely. Kehler spent time in jail for resisting the Vietnam draft and refusing to pay taxes to support the bloated military budget. (He lost; authorities confiscated his home for tax evasion.) Granny D. successfully stopped nuclear detonations near an Eskimo village in the 1960s. Kiely, a retired United Methodist preacher, has been arrested five times, by his own estimate. He has protested against nuclear proliferation and against the murder of religious clergy in El Salvador.
And then there’s Ronnie Dugger. Dugger had never been arrested before he was locked up in one of the Capitol rotunda demonstrations. But he, too, has a long history on the front lines of political reform.
He was the founding editor of the Texas Observer, which established itself as a premier voice of the left in the fifties and sixties. He is one of Texas’s most famous liberals. He has a reputation as a keen observer of corruption. He sharpened his national reputation with critical books on Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan.
In August 1995, Dugger published an essay in the Nation daring progressives to take dramatic steps in the fight against corporate influence.
"This is a call to hope and to action," Dugger wrote. "A call to reclaim and reinvent democracy, a call to the hard work of reorganizing ourselves into a broad national coalition, a call to populists, workers, progressives and liberals to reconstitute ourselves into a smashing new national force to end corporate rule."
The response to the essay was enthusiastic. Thousands wrote letters. A turning point had been reached. Taking his own advice, Dugger helped organize the Alliance for Democracy. The Alliance now has sixty chapters and more than 2,500 members across the United States.
Taking on campaign finance reform was the next logical step for the Alliance. The Democracy Brigade, which staged the protests at the rotunda, is a project of the Alliance.
"We want a non-violent, national citizen’s revolt," Dugger says. "We are not going to sit around and wait for Senator Feingold and Senator McCain to pull our chestnuts out of the fire."
Although activists like Dugger and Kehler are leading this new effort in the reform movement, the traditional Washington groups are conspicuously absent. Groups like Common Cause, Public Citizen, Public Campaign and U.S. PIRG have issued statements in support of the protests, and helped with publicity. But members of these groups have declined to get arrested themselves, although they apparently are pleased someone else is willing to do so.
"It’s going to help our cause," says Frank Clemente, executive director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. " If people are willing to put their bodies on the line that will help galvanize people’s thinking and help them realize that something serious is at stake here, and that they can do something to change it."
Not There Yet
Thus far this inchoate movement — if it really can be called that — is but a pale version of the sixties-style social protests its modeled after. Before the members of the Democracy Brigade marched on the Capitol leaders let the police know in advance they were coming. Like so many events in politics these days the protests were as scripted and choreographed as a Ronald Reagan photo op. At the January demonstration a police officer asked solicitously if anybody had any special needs or medical problems. Chicago‘68 this ain’t.
But will it work? The Alliance is clearly trying to model its efforts after the divestiture movement to force local, state and national governments to eliminate their financial holdings in South Africa. In the 1980s activists conducted almost daily protests outside the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. Over a period of just six months more than 1,800 people were arrested including celebrities like Stevie Wonder and Gloria Steinem along with eighteen U.S. House members. With each arrest, there was gathering media coverage and a growing sense that the United States should divest.
The Alliance is dedicated to non-violence. Alliance members plan to hold an event each month in the Capitol to attract national attention, and to put pressure on lawmakers to hold hearings on public funding. Several Alliance members are considering establishing Brigade-style events in their home state capitols.
Campaign finance reform may face more of a challenge than some other movements. Congress has little incentive to change a system that gives incumbents an advantage. And while the American people have mobilized for campaign finance reform on the state level — in Maine in 1995 a thousand voters gathered 65,000 signatures in fourteen hours to get campaign finance reform on the ballot — on the national level, where their outrage could make a difference, Americans have seemed more cynical and hopeless about changing the system.
"People engage in protest because they are angry about something," says Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University specializing in labor and social movements. "People aren’t angry about politicians having all this money, they are sour about it."
More and more people, though, are getting angry at the system. Senator John McCain’s national campaign has tapped into that frustration. But the attempt to take campaign finance reform to the streets has not yet occurred on a grand scale. And the protests have attracted limited attention. The New York Times has yet to take notice. (Scorecard for the Paper of Record as of March 1: 3 protests, 15 arrests, and 0 articles.)
Campaign reform has also failed to engage college students, the shock troops of most other successful social protest movements. Only in the Massachusetts protest did they have participate in significant numbers.
"We are not there yet," says Arianna Huffington, who has engaged in her own direct action on behalf of campaign finance reform. She sponsored a Boston Tea Party on February 8 in which she and members of Mass Voters for Clean Elections threw boxes of "dirty money" into the city’s historic harbor. "There is no question we have not reached critical mass. But there is also no question that the wind is at our backs now."