Rising tide of frustration

By Bob Edgar

I go way back with Arlen Specter - I was the runner-up when he was reelected to the Senate in 1986 - so I was watching closely this week to see how he would fare in the toughest test of his long career. Specter is nothing if not resilient, and after watching him repeatedly beat Hodgkin's disease, I wouldn't have been surprised to see him turn back another challenge, this time from Rep. Joe Sestak in the Democratic primary.

Specter's inability to do so - despite his toughness and considerable political skills - tells us a lot about the strong and rising tide of populist anger in the electorate. Besides Specter, it has swept over Utah Sen. Bob Bennett and Kentucky Senate candidate Trey Grayson, both Republicans, as well as West Virginia Rep. Alan Mollohan and Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln (who is now facing a runoff), both Democrats.

Regardless of their ideology, voters everywhere are restless and even angry about a government that too often seems to be in the grip of powerful special interests and deaf to the concerns of the middle class. Wall Street takes our money and uses it to reward people who nearly brought down the economy. A big oil company and its subcontractors despoil the Gulf of Mexico and then have the gall to argue about who is responsible. And the government presiding over all this looks as unruly and unreasonable as a classroom full of eighth graders.

Making a bad situation worse is the recent Supreme Court decision reversing decades of commonsense campaign-finance law and lifting the ban on corporate and union spending on campaigns. As a result, voters are likely to see a huge infusion of corporate money in the coming midterm elections.

To untangle this mess, we need to overhaul the political system that created it. That means changing the way we pay for political campaigns so that the special interests that want the most from Congress - often legislation or policies that help their bottom line or give them unfair advantages - aren't doing most of the campaign fund-raising and donating. That's what we have now, and it's a recipe for a government that caters to the special interests, not the public interest.

The good news is that there is a better way. Common Cause is working hard to change the way we elect members of Congress so that they will be more interested in serving their constituents, not their most generous donors. A bill that may get a vote on the House floor this month, known as the DISCLOSE Act, would make corporate and union spending more transparent.

That's important, but it doesn't go far enough. Real change - the kind voters are demanding - will come only with passage of the Fair Elections Now Act, which would create a voluntary system allowing congressional candidates to run competitive campaigns using a blend of unlimited small donations and limited public funding.

Candidates who opt into the system would swear off large contributions and money from political action committees, agreeing to accept only contributions of up to $100 from individual donors. Those candidates would receive limited public "Fair Elections Funds" providing a 4-to-1 match of their small, in-state donations, enough to cover the cost of a serious campaign and get a message out to voters. Fair Election Funds would come from a small fee paid by the largest government contractors, with no impact on the federal deficit.

To date, 18 senators and 152 House members from both parties have signed on as cosponsors of the bill. They sense and share their constituents' frustrations with the current system, and they must work to get the bill to a vote on the House floor this year.

As they study Tuesday's returns from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Arkansas, more of my former congressional colleagues are going to see the Fair Elections Now Act as an idea whose time has come. They will realize that embracing the significant change that frustrated voters are demanding in these early primary races will make them better candidates and more effective members of Congress. To borrow the wise words of the late, great Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois, having felt the heat, they will see the light.