Court misses the mark
If the money flowing into politics cannot be stemmed at the source, why can't it be dammed at the outlet?
In a closely watched case from Vermont, the US Supreme Court on Monday reiterated a 1976 ruling that found that limiting a candidate's campaign spending is an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. That means Christopher F. Gabrieli can wrap the First Amendment around the obscene $15.36 million spending cap he has set for himself in what promises to be a historically expensive three-way Democratic primary race for governor of Massachusetts.
The mixed signals sent by the high court -- there were six opinions -- guarantee continuation of the prolonged national debate about campaign finance reform in a political system beset by what Justice David H. Souter called ``the pernicious effect of the nonstop pursuit of money." It is as though the 6-to-3 majority missed the last 30 years and the lessons we have learned since the court first held that campaign spending limits were a restriction on free speech.
A sharply divided court means the issue is certain to be revisited. In the meantime, one approach to reducing the corrosive influence of money in politics would be to reduce the need for so much of it.
More than half of most competitive campaign budgets are devoured by the cost of television and radio advertising, enormous private profit for broadcasters that are licensed by the federal government to use airwaves that belong to the American people. That license ought to come with an explicit responsibility to provide free and substantial air time to candidates for public office. It now requires broadcasters to promise only that they will operate for ``the public interest, convenience, and necessity." The occasional gubernatorial debate is not adequate programming in the public interest during an election year.
Until it was repealed during the Reagan administration, the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to provide access to diverse political views and candidates or risk their license renewal. The law requires them only to sell air time to any candidate who can afford the price of free speech. No wonder four of the five candidates for governor are millionaires.
Gabrieli spent more than $2.6 million in a couple of months in a successful bid to get on the primary ballot by garnering the votes of 15 percent of the delegates to the Democratic State Convention earlier this month. Much of that money was spent on saturation television advertising and touting his experience as a venture capitalist. Those ads were the source of most of the information television viewers had in the spring about the late arrival to the governor's race.
Broadcasters and their well-financed allies in Congress have balked at calls for free air time for political candidates and issue-oriented programming. Why kill the goose that laid the golden egg? In response to their reticence, public interest groups with the help of Senator John McCain, Republican from Arizona, and Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, have tried in vain to amend the federal Communications Act of 1934 to mandate minimum time requirements for free political programming in the weeks preceding a primary or general election.
That would mean that Massachusetts would be spared millions of dollars worth of self-aggrandizing, often misleading television ads that will blanket the airwaves between Labor Day and the Democratic primary Sept. 19. It would mean that whoever is the Democratic nominee and the independent Christy Mihos would not be buying up airtime to match Republican Kerry Healey's expenditures in the weeks leading up to the general election in November.
It is a tough sell. Broadcasters do not want to be required to provide specified political programming, though they would control the content. Any mandate, they say, would violate the First Amendment, the favorite cloak of opponents of campaign finance reform everywhere.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
