MAYDAY.US

GUEST POST - Stark360 is not a 180°

Guest - Brian Boyko — 2014-09-09

Our blog is migrating. This blog post will now live here: http://blog.mayday.us/post/98260005380/

Professor Lessig explained a bit on his personal blog about about our short-term cooperation with Stark360, a very conservative PAC, but I thought I might also chip in with my two cents, and a perspective very different from the Professor’s.

Because while Mayday PAC is a non-partisan initiative, we do have partisans of both parties working with us and volunteering for us. I’m one of them.

I’m a Democrat. I ran for state rep (briefly, before Mayday PAC was founded), as a Democrat. If I ever run for office again, it’ll be as a Democrat. Ask me where I stand on any controversial issue, 90% of the time, it’ll agree with the Democratic party platform. And I think Stark360 is wrong on most of the issues they stand for.

Now, because I am partisan, I’m able to make suggestions to Mayday PAC, I can plead, nag, and beg, (and did so in a lengthy whitepaper to the board). But ultimately I do not have final decision into what candidates to support or what races to enter. This is by design, because this effort towards reform requires solutions that Americans of both parties can get behind, and it requires a movement that unites both “my team” and “the other team.”

I’m not thrilled with Stark360. Stark360 is a PAC that promots libertarian, conservative candidates. Typically for libertarian groups, it says it’s opposed to “campaign finance reform.”

We don’t like them. They don’t like us. However, we have found a single point of common ground - support for Jim Rubens in the Republican primary of New Hampshire.

But they’re supporting Jim Rubens because Rubens is a strong, conservative candidate (who they disagree with on campaign finance reform) and we’re supporting Rubens because we agree with him on campaign finance reform (even though many of our volunteers, staff, and donors may disagree with him on his conservatism.)

Politics makes strange bedfellows indeed. We have helped each other out in the same way that Churchill and Stalin united against the Axis; though the two had deeply opposed ideologies, they shared a common enemy.

We found that both of us could spend less money accomplishing the same goal by co-funding messaging strategies to help Rubens, and canvassers to support Rubens. But we did not - would not - fund any efforts to help their other candidates who were opposed to reform.

The one thing that Stark360 and Mayday do have in common (other than our Rubens support) is that, as Stark360’s chairman Aaron Day said, “While we may not agree with where [MayDay] is on campaign finance, we agree that cronyism and corruption is a problem that, frankly, people of all political views are deeply concerned about.”

We don’t think there’s a viable way to address cronyism and corruption without campaign finance reform. But at least Day agrees with us on the existence of the problem. That is huge, and that is perhaps more than I - with my partisan perspective - would have given any libertarian or conservative group credit for.

Were I in Prof. Lessig’s shoes, I probably would not have talked to Stark360 because of my partisanship. Which is precisely why I’m not in Professor Lessig’s shoes. Instead, by finding common ground, Mayday PAC has been more effective in our efforts towards getting a pro-reform candidate elected.

And I think both Day and Lessig did something that more politicians need to do more often: they tried to see each other’s point of view. When you do that, you start to realize why conservative and libertarian groups may be wary about reforming the system of campaign financing, even though they also understand that corruption is harming their issues as well as those of progressives.

Most libertarians want to ensure that no matter who you are, you have the right to say whatever you want, to whatever ability you have to be heard. And they fear that reform may take the shape it has in other democracies, where limits are placed upon how much one can donate, how much one can raise, or how much one can spend.

Or, perhaps even worse, that the government - not the citizen - would determine who, and what ideas, get funded.

We get the concern. But that’s not what we stand for at all. Indeed, we believe, as libertarians do, that the above are to be avoided.

Our aim is citizen-funded elections.

What we’re hoping is that candidates will be able to raise money from the voters, rather than from elite individuals, crony capitalists, and special-interest groups, which is what they do now.

In order to do that, we want to enable citizens to earmark part of their own tax contribution towards political speech. How this is done - vouchers, matching funds, tax credits - can be argued about. And there is certainly room for amendment.

But whatever the form it takes, the most important idea is that it is entirely opt-in for both the candidate and for the citizen. Reform does not not restrict raising or spending money, and those citizens and candidates who think there’s nothing wrong with the status quo can still participate in it.

No government tells you which candidates to support (if any.) And your tax dollars go to speech you support - my tax dollars go to mine.

Right now, Congress has an incentive to serve their funders, and a duty to serve the people. Citizen-funded elections resolve that conflict of interests by providing a way for Congress to raise a viable amount of money from the people they have a duty to serve.

I’m pretty sure that if you sat down one-on-one with libertarian members of Stark360, answered their questions, and explained the details, many if not most would probably come around to the idea of citizen funded elections. But how can progressives like myself expect conservatives to come to the table to listen to our ideas and concerns if we’re no longer willing to grant them the courtesy of listening to theirs?

This was a special post from guest author Brian Boyko


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