Time To Fix Campaign Financing Or Else

If liberals could be organized - which is a singularly silly way to begin a sentence - they’d be out of here. Out of the Democratic Party. The degree of disaffection and disgust over President Clinton signing the welfare bill cannot be exaggerated. If Republicans want some good news, it’s that a lot of progressive Democrats will be sitting on their hands this fall - or voting for consumer activist Ralph Nader.

The old debates about voting for the lesser of two weevils (a Patrick O’Brien pun) once more dominate the honest newsprint of liberal periodicals. (You can always tell a liberal magazine - with all due respect to Mother Jones - because it is printed on cheap newsprint rather than the slick paper used by the corporate-backed right-wing journals.) Just as cynicism and disgust about politics are deeper and stronger than ever in the general population, so it is on the left - or, as we always say self-consciously these days, “what’s left of the left.”

The disappointment with Bill Clinton varies from those who always thought he was a fraud or a Democratic Leadership Council Trojan horse to those who finally said, “That’s it,” after he signed the welfare bill. The last straw.

Not even the specter of a Bob Dole presidency rouses them from their new and determined apathy. Even the normally invigorating thought of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., does nothing for them. It’s like watching a hunting dog too depressed even to chase its favorite ugly orange tomcat anymore.

Regulating tobacco may be well and good (said this cranky libertarian, lighting another Marlboro), but it’s a feather against the lead weight of letting a million children slide into the cesspool of poverty. Three-and-a-half-million children off public assistance by 2001. … Big numbers don’t mean anything; children’s lives do.

I guess you have to be as old as Clinton to remember what small-town Southern schoolhouses were like before Lyndon B. Johnson’s much-derided War on Poverty. Such as in east Texas, where half the children had those vacant stares, sitting in school learning nothing because they weren’t getting enough to eat.

Grits and gelatin. Before several thousand articles attacking the school lunch program and school breakfast programs and food stamps being used to buy vodka (let’s thank the Gipper one more time for that myth), there was the grits-and-gelatin blank stare.

That was in the good old days Dole remembers so well - before wasteful government spending, before a herd of paid hacks taught us that government can’t do anything good for people except get out of their lives.

Having learned my lesser-weevilism in a hard school - here in Texas, where people’s lives literally depend on whatever incremental changes we can manage - I am, as of now, prepared to vote Democratic one more time.

One, I’d like to see whether Democrats are capable of learning. I’d like to see Congress run by Democrats again just to see if they get it. It shouldn’t take long - I would say 10 minutes, but I’m given to hyperbole. So, say between 10 days and two weeks. One shot, one bill: public campaign financing.

Either do it or get out of the way. There’s not a reason in the world why every single Democrat shouldn’t get right with Jesus on campaign financing because the corporate money has gone Republican, and it ain’t coming back.

I’ll say it one more time: Our political system is so corrupted by money that it’s sickening to watch.

Under the Republican Congress, corporate lobbyists literally sat at committee tables with lawmakers and wrote legislation dismantling the federal Clean Air Act so companies could pollute without penalty. They wrote bills to gut the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, with some assistance from Dole. Timber companies wrote riders so they could clearcut in national forests again.

The corruption is so clear and so massive that no fool can miss it. And the American people are not fools.

We have government of corporate special interests, by corporate special interests and for corporate special interests.

And that will not change until we change the way campaigns are financed.

One chance. That’s all.

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