Tonight while watching former president Bill Clinton’s interview on the Daily Show I came to realize that he had raised a very valid point about campaign fundraising. Mr. Clinton mentioned that most Congressmen, Senators, and Presidential hopefuls spend a lot of their free time flying around and trying to raise funds to get re-elected. In my opinion this time could be better spent listening to constituents and working on new bills with other elected officials. Even Barack Obama talked about this problem in his book The Audacity of Hope. While Mr. Clinton stated that this was a problem I started to think about possible solutions. One idea I had was that congress passes a law that does two things.
First off it would make it illegal to put ad’s supporting or condemning a candidate (candidates only, ad’s about currently serving elected officials would be allowed as long as they pertained to their current office and not their candidacy) on TV. The practical approach of this is that the amount of money required to campaign is reduced significantly. However on a deeper more intellectual level this would almost force voters to watch debates and listen to their candidate’s opinions rather than form an opinion based on a 30 second commercial that flashes on their TV between innings of the ball game. Personally I think walking to the voting both knowing nothing more about the potential candidates then what you saw on those commercials is a piss poor way to choose the man who will represent you for the next several years and vote on your behalf in a political assembly of some sort.
The second thing this law should do is limit the amount of money that a candidate can spend on their campaign to a reasonable level based on the office they are running for giving all of the candidates an equal chance to promote themselves. This law would also place limits on how much money can be spent in certain periods such as before primaries and after. In addendum to this part of the law would be a stipulation that any serving official (such as a US Senator) would have the opportunity to present a petition for funding to the political body within which they currently represent (The US Senate) signed by a reasonable number of their current constituents and said body would allocate a portion of the funding allowed from that point up until the end of primaries at which point it would be assumed that any candidate with the potential to advance would be backed by a party or have significant private backers.
With these stipulations in place not only would the candidates need less money to campaign but elected officials in current service could spend more time with their voters and at work as opposed to constantly trying to raise money in order to be reelected or elected to a higher office. So by forcing voters to look into their candidates as well as give these candidates more time with which to talk to voters rather than fundraising we can increase voter awareness of issues as well as maintain a higher level of connectivity for the official to his voters.
2 comments:
The original problem you stated was that the candidates are not spending enough time working on new legislation and such, but if you took away the television campaigning, it would require the politicians to spend more time away from Washington to get their word out. I agree that television advertising can get annoying, but banning it altogether has to be a violation of the First Amendment.
I full support limiting the amount of money that can be spent for campaigning. Not only would this solve a lot of the issues you adresses, but it would also allow people from less lucrative backgrounds to get their foot in the door. As it is now, one must be very wealthy and have a lot of wealthy friends to realistically run for a spot in congress, not to mention president. The problem this creates is that everyone in congress is rich yet they are expected to represent everyone, not just their rich buddies.
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