WSJ Editorial: Clean Gene's Other Legacy
Eugene McCarthy's death Saturday at age 89 has offered antiwar liberals an opportunity to relive the glory days of 1968, when then-Senator McCarthy embarrassed President Lyndon B. Johnson out of the race with an insurgent run on an anti-Vietnam line.
We hate to interrupt the self-reverie, but it's worth noting that Gene McCarthy's achievement in driving his own party's sitting President out the primary campaign is unlikely to be repeated any time soon. And the reason is campaign-finance reform.
McCarthy took pleasure in being a maverick politician; he endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980 because, he said, "anyone would be better" than Jimmy Carter. And party mavericks are just the sort of people that party machines love to keep down, or out. McCarthy himself could never have mounted his last-ditch campaign against Johnson without the backing of industrialist Stewart Mott and banker Jack Dreyfus. But it was not self-interest that motivated McCarthy's long opposition to campaign-finance reform. It was, rather, the conviction that restricting the supply of money would do more to entrench party establishments than it would to "take the money out of politics."
The money will always be there, because politics will always cost money. Restricting the channels through which money can flow into politics does not "keep it clean." It merely empowers the gatekeepers.
The irony of campaign-finance reform is that in the name of reducing financial contributions from the rich and powerful, it has made candidates far more likely to be either rich or powerful. A genuine believer in free speech, Gene McCarthy understood what too many of his fellow liberals have forgotten.
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We hate to interrupt the self-reverie, but it's worth noting that Gene McCarthy's achievement in driving his own party's sitting President out the primary campaign is unlikely to be repeated any time soon. And the reason is campaign-finance reform.
McCarthy took pleasure in being a maverick politician; he endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980 because, he said, "anyone would be better" than Jimmy Carter. And party mavericks are just the sort of people that party machines love to keep down, or out. McCarthy himself could never have mounted his last-ditch campaign against Johnson without the backing of industrialist Stewart Mott and banker Jack Dreyfus. But it was not self-interest that motivated McCarthy's long opposition to campaign-finance reform. It was, rather, the conviction that restricting the supply of money would do more to entrench party establishments than it would to "take the money out of politics."
The money will always be there, because politics will always cost money. Restricting the channels through which money can flow into politics does not "keep it clean." It merely empowers the gatekeepers.
The irony of campaign-finance reform is that in the name of reducing financial contributions from the rich and powerful, it has made candidates far more likely to be either rich or powerful. A genuine believer in free speech, Gene McCarthy understood what too many of his fellow liberals have forgotten.