Wes Vernon
May 19, 2008
Post-Watergate morality: enough already! Kudos to Cindy McCain
By Wes Vernon

It is time to wipe the slate clean of campaign "reform" legislation enacted since Watergate gave us the scandal habit. Examples of "reform" failures abound.

Take "special prosecutors," whose legal gymnastics have been employed to criminalize policy differences and have given witch-hunting a bad name for undeserving witches.

The time has arrived for replacing faux reform as a "gotcha" weapon with real reform that plays no favorites, but really does — well, reform. (We'll get to specifics. Be patient.)

Straw breaking the camel's back

The "final straw" for this column came with a pressure on — not a candidate — but a candidate's wife. Editorial writers and self-appointed "watchdogs" are demanding that Cindy McCain release her tax returns. In itself, the expectation that she "owes" it to the "public" to share her financial business going back several years is an unwarranted intrusion. What it says about a larger issue — i.e., politicians regulating politicians' campaigns against each other — reveals the absurd, if not the outrageous.

Just do it because we're curious

Cindy McCain is the heiress to Hensley and Co., a major beer distributor for Anheuser-Busch. She has wisely chosen to file separate returns from those of her husband, Senator John McCain. She possessed the assets before she married him. She need not open up her entire financial life to the world.

"This is a privacy issue," the spouse of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee declares. "My husband is the candidate."

Parenthetically, one might ask where are the raging feminists in our midst who wail that a woman should "be her own person," and not be tied down by her husband. Hypocrisy enters the picture big-time when the self-righteous NOW-types fail to rise to the defense of a woman who files her own returns and refuses to make them public essentially on the grounds that being married to a presidential candidate does not deprive her of her own personhood. But apparently (surprise!) a different standard applies if the woman in question is anywhere to the right of — say — Barbara Boxer.

Newspaper editorialists

However, The Washington Post — amongst those leading the wolf pack badgering Mrs. McCain on this issue — is at least consistent, albeit consistently wrong. Its May 14 edition wears as a badge of honor the protestation that its own editorialists had made the same demand of Teresa Heinz-Kerry (wife of presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004) and John Zaccaro (husband of vice-presidential hopeful Geraldine Ferraro in 1984), and they relented.

Now the Post applies the pressure to Cindy McCain, and guess what. She is not following the path of the other political spouses, and the editorial writers are asking — in so many words — what's the matter with this woman that she won't jump through our hoops?

The answer, of course, is the Post was wrong then and is wrong now. It is not Mrs. McCain's fault that Heinz-Kerry and Zaccaro wimped out.

The Washington Times — usually aligned with clear thinking (unlike the Post) — is, if anything, even worse on this issue. That paper (also on May 14) was shocked, shocked, shocked that Mrs. McCain "used accoutrements of her wealth" to help rescue the senator's campaign at its low point. The company which she headed used its corporate jet to transport her husband/candidate. That was perfectly legal (since the jet was owned within the family), even though the Times calls it a "loophole."

The lowest cut of all was an accompanying image by Bill Garner — the Times' in-house cartoonist — facetiously positing Mrs. Cain as saying to her critics, "Let 'em drink beer."

It says here...

The Post argues that presidential candidates and their spouses "relinquish a significant measure of privacy." If that means wall-to-wall publicity — the good, the bad, the ugly and unwanted, reporters camped out on the candidate's lawn, etc., coupled with investigative or opposition research on the candidate's private life — all that goes with the territory. It is not the same as showing everyone your tax filings. The income tax return is the most personal interaction between the citizen and his government.

Expecting a candidate and/or spouse to open his/her tax returns pushes the envelope into different and relatively new territory — having been more or less the norm for only the last 20 to 30 years.

The nonsense began when...

What the McCains did with the jet (where BTW the candidate carried his own baggage) followed the letter of the law to the crossed Ts and dotted Is. But from whence does this notion arise in public print and airwaves that the wife of a candidate (or the candidate himself for that matter) is obligated to release her/his tax returns?

Such pressured "openness" has led to embarrassing revelations by the Clintons — for which those of us who wish the Clintons out of our faces take a minimum of discomfort. But giving us a good chuckle at their expense does not make it right. Bear in mind we're not talking here about criminal or "need to know" security cases or tax evasion. Rather, we are dealing with simple curiosity.

The origin

The mere fact that we are even debating the very idea of producing personal tax returns to an insatiably curious public eye is a symptom of a larger problem and lends credence to the clichιd wisdom that one extreme brings about another.

It is impossible to examine this post-Watergate nonsense without noting the irony that the culture of over-the-top intrusiveness into every nook and cranny of a candidate's (and his family's) life gained much of its momentum at the hands of the senator himself. His McCain-Feingold law's implied presumption that nothing is beyond government inspection or curtailment is an example. It even compromises the First Amendment (which the senator at times has put in quotation marks, suggesting that perhaps freedom of speech is an open question).

The current stalemate

Current law (possibly by fortunate oversight) does not require Cindy McCain to release tax returns. But the very culture that has caused editorial writers to make routine demands that candidates and their spouses do so has also spawned McCain-Feingold, and before that the "special prosecutors." That same culture gave birth to yet another parcel of mischief — the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

The FEC could have contributed to robust political discourse from now until November simply by shutting down. The commission (by law split evenly — three Democrats and three Republicans) has been inoperative for months for lack of a quorum.

Alas, that apparently is about to change. President Bush's controversial FEC nominee Republican Hans Von Spakovsky has withdrawn from consideration. Unfortunately, that unclogs a partisan logjam in the Senate that had held up the confirmation of other nominees, as well.

Spakovsky's fate is a classic study in the art of post-Watergate Mickey Mouse games. The Democrats blocked his confirmation vote. His heinous crime? When he was in the Justice Department, Mr. Spakovsky overruled department bureaucrats who wanted to strike down a Georgia law requiring voters to present a government-issued ID before voting. Senate Democrats sided with the bureaucrats, whose known leanings suggested they were less inclined to legal impartiality than to partisan hackery. After all was said and done, Spakovsky was later vindicated when the Supreme Court upheld a similar voter ID law in Indiana.

So now that he is out of the picture and the Democrats' hold on his nomination becomes moot, Republicans are about to release their own retaliatory hold on other nominees.

Thus the commission likely will not be "going dark" (as they say in theatre jargon) for the duration of the campaign. A pity.

Real campaign reform

Anyone serious about real campaign reform will support this very simple solution: Mandate that every candidate's campaign must report the names and amounts of its campaign contributions within minutes of their receipt. Even low-income people willing to part with five or ten dollars? Congress can debate where to draw that line, if at all.

Get the information out there on the Internet so anyone with a computer can look it up for himself. For the wireless, not to worry. The bloggers, talk radio, investigative reporters, and opposition researchers can spread the word. No limit on how much to contribute, but if any one person or entity contributes a suspiciously disproportionate amount or has a criminal record or bad reputation, that information will be available. Let the sun shine bright. The voters can draw their own conclusions. Contrary to elitist stereotypes, voters are not inherently stupid. And campaigns refusing to comply would be vulnerable to stiff meaningful punishment.

Getting serious

Sorry to say, the proposal will likely never see the light of day. Politicians live by the rule that there is no point in writing into law something so simple and direct when an approach that is convoluted and requires brain surgery can easily be crafted.

But who knows? Senator McCain himself may quietly come to terms with the fact that full disclosure beats the free speech threats in his "reform" law or a "gotcha" culture that results in the harassment of his wife to release her tax returns.

© Wes Vernon

 

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