Outside a hot live music spot in Wilmington, NC, I excitedly talked to friends about getting folks to call their state senators and demand electronic filing of campaign finance reports. “I’d rather stick a fork in my eye,” one of my new friends said laughing. And there it was, the reality of things, the nitty gritty of campaign finance reform seemed excruciatingly dull to them.

Vice President Biden recently spoke about this conundrum associated with another important topic, voter suppression, during his appearance at Netroots Nation 2014. “…the most precious right Americans possess is the unfettered access to the ballot box…it is not as sexy, it is not as immediately heart-wrenching…,” Biden proclaimed. But for those of us who see the importance of such reforms, the question is: How can we make it a bit more sexy and heart-wrenching?

The Short Game

Don’t bet on simple transparency narratives alone doing anything meaningful. My inbox is flooded with fundraising emails touting the Koch Brothers influence on the political process – it may triple donations but seems to do little else. Let’s do more to connect the dots between contributions and legislative action/inaction. Short attention spans require accurate and quick but deeper narratives that may spark further interest and engagement. Supporting the development of phone apps that do this is a critical next step to making things more visually attractive and understandable. A great app that has many of these features is Open States. Download it!

Rhode Island is ahead of the curve on assuring candidates and committees file their campaign data electronically, but there are many states that are still flooding their election boards with paper reports. If you’re in one of those states (e.g. North Carolina), make sure campaigns are required to file data electronically. It’s the only way that our future apps will be able to quickly crunch the numbers.

The Long Game

The fluid challenges facing mainstream newspapers threatens the future of investigative journalism, the kind that gets your heart throbbing in the face of corruption and abuse of power. The apps above might be useful, but we will always need a vibrant journalistic community to inspire us to use those apps! Let’s vote with our dollar and invest in solid journalism.

Lastly, let’s not forget that any reform rests on an educated and engaged citizenry. One of my favorite quotes from President Jefferson addresses this:

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power” (1820).

If your favored candidate for any office this fall doesn’t have a well-articulated position on assuring an enlightened society, they’re no good. Some of us learn about political engagement in home, most of us learn about it in school. The long game requires an inspiring and thorough education in civics and history.

The Last Step

This last step completes a formula for making campaign finance reform a bit more sexy: Hold elected officials accountable with your vote. Make sure every candidate you ever vote for has a well-articulated education plan and a specific position on a robust civics program.

And finally support Senator Whitehouse’s DISCLOSE Act. It’s common sense legislation from the great state of Rhode Island.

Monday Jan 13, 2013
North Kingstown, RI – Good morning, Ocean State. This is Bob Plain, editor and publisher of the RI Future blog podcasting to you from The Hideaway on the banks of the Mattatuxet River behind the Shady Lea Mill in North Kingstown, Rhode Island.

It’s Monday, January 13 … and while last week we wondered if Rhode Island was the only state in the nation to have a governor who surfs, this week we’ll be wondering if we’re the only state to have a gubernatorial hopeful responsible for a traffic fatality.

The Providence Journal reports this morning that in 1989, a 19-year-old Allan Fung, now mayor of Cranston who is running for governor, was arrested for the death of a man after a car accident he caused on Interstate 95. The charges were later dropped. Fung was coming home from college for the weekend and he allegedly lost consciousness, or maybe he fell asleep at the wheel, crossed three lanes of traffic and hit and killed a man who was changing a tire in the breakdown lane.

Wow … what a life-changing event for Mayor Fung. A lot of folks wouldn’t have the courage to enter public service after such an experience. I applaud him for telling this story, and more so for being able to move on from it.

That said, Sam Howard penned an important piece about both Republican candidates for governor late last week … both Fung and Barrington millionaire Ken Block agreed to boycott John DePetro and/or WPRO, but quickly abandoned their commitment as soon as the hateful shock jock’s month in exile was over.

On NBC 10 News Conference this weekend, we debated the merits of legalizing marijuana. Justin Katz, the ostensibly small government libertarian-leaning conservative, said he’s afraid it will lead to a government monopoly over drugs and prostitution. Ironically enough his opposition to marijuana smacks of paranoia.

I can’t believe I actually have opportunity to say this, but the ProJo editorial page has a more nuanced and reasonable reason for opposing legalization this morning. They write the legalization could increase use among kids. Experts don’t necessarily agree.

In December, East Greenwich school drug counselor Bob Houghtaling joined Jared Moffat and Rebecca McGoldrick of Regulate RI here in the RI Future newsroom to talk about just this topic. Houghtaling thinks it will be easier to teach kids how to make healthy choices about pot if we take a less punative approach.

In other news about potentially progressive legislation this year from the State House … Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed said last week that her chamber will focus on addressing poverty this session as a means to fixing Rhode Island’s ailing economy.

And in New Hampshire this week, the talk is about campaign finance reform. Harvard professor and Rootstriker Lawrence Lessig organized, with Demand Progress and Rhode Island’s own David Segal, a two week march through the Granite State to get residents to demand presidential candidates take a stand against money dominating politics.

Friend of RI Future Mike McCarthy is there for the entire two weeks and we hope he’ll be checking in with us on occassion. In the meantime, here’s my interview with McCarthy from Friday … he stopped by the Hideaway to borrow my sleeping bag for his trip. Listen to our conversation about his adventure here.

Fast-forward to 2012 and incumbent Senator Scott Brown reached out to challenger Elizabeth Warren (read the actual correspondence) and challenged her to enter a People’s Pledge. Modeled after the Weld-Kerry agreement it included limits on outside spending (it’s notable that no one is talking about limiting total expenditures any more—Citizens United changed the political landscape and dialogue). After significant back and forth, both candidates signed on and even sent notice to third party groups and TV stations that might run their ads, warning them to stay out of the race.

Common Cause Massachusetts reported that the 2012 People’s Pledge did a great job at minimizing outside money in the Brown-Warren race when compared to similar races that year. We know that outside spending is overwhelmingly negative, can come from undisclosed sources, and can be raised in unlimited amounts. In 2013 when the Gomez-Markey race did not have a pledge outside spending from right and left came flooding back in.

So here we are in neighboring Rhode Island looking at the prospect of a very expensive Democratic primary, followed by a very short, but quite-possibly expensive, general election for governor in 2014. Typically races for governor aren’t fought on the national issues that draws outside groups into Senate races but that may be different this time.

Common Cause Rhode Island would like to see all candidates for governor negotiate a People’s Pledge.  We mentioned the idea over a month ago when the first self-described Super PAC emerged.  Sam Howard wrote about the idea at length on RI Future soon after.  Quite frankly, we were waiting for the candidates to actually declare before we began to push for an agreement.

So now the cat is out of the bag.  As a non-partisan group that does not engage in electioneering it would be easy to just let the topic die.  We do not want to be seen as favoring any candidate over another.  But this is too important a topic.  Rhode Island deserves a campaign in 2014 that will focus on issues, not attacks. We deserve to know where the money that is backing the candidates is coming from. For those reasons we are asking the would-be candidates to meet and discuss this idea.

This won’t be easy.  Massachusetts has demonstrated that these agreements might take some time to work out, but that they can work.  Each candidate has strengths and weaknesses when it comes to campaign finance and the negotiations should address those.  As the Supreme Court dismantles limits on money in politics (and next it might be limits on contributions directly to candidates) we need to look to alternatives.  The People’s Pledge may be our best hope.  Let’s give it a try.

I believe in the application of democracy, that our ideas and politicians have to be challenged in order to strengthen them. Representative David Cicilline shouldn’t get a free ride (though, obviously, no one can really accuse him of that since Providence Mayor Angel Taveras announced a “category 5 hurricane” about the city’s finances). I think that, regardless of how much I personally feel that between Mr. Cicilline and Mr. Gemma that Mr. Cicilline is clearly the better candidate, Mr. Gemma needs to stay in the race.

This should apply to everyone. In our democracy, it’s a shame that anyone ever stands in any election unchallenged. I’m not deaf to the idea that sometimes the best candidate is already in office, but I sincerely doubt it always applies. Everyone needs to be capable of defending their ideas; those who don’t tend to get sloppy. Even worse, they can get entitled. Mr. Cicilline clearly never got the chance to feel entitled to his seat; when Mr. Taveras made his now famous remarks as to the city’s financial condition, the uphill battle began. Everyday since then has been a justification of why Mr. Cicilline should remain in office. That‘s a good thing. These telephone town halls, while pretty ubiquitous, have been a departure from Patrick Kennedy’s tenure when the representative was… someplace, talking to some people.

Mr. Gemma serves a purpose; to ask the question “can Mr. Cicilline serve as the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer for Representative in RI CD-1?” However terrible an instrument Mr. Gemma is for that purpose, we’ll know the answer on September 11th.

This principle should’ve extended to the Republican race as well. John Loughlin II dropping out was bad for Rhode Island. It denied Republicans the chance to vet their candidate. Hopefully, Michael Donahue can fill Mr. Loughlin’s shoes; although I sincerely doubt he will, with the twin issues of a dislike of lawyers & law enforcement and the Federal Reserve and a likely resources and media coverage deficit.

Today being filing day, it’s important that those who can go out and do as Rep. Teresa Tanzi (D-Narragansett, Peace Dale, Wakefield) told the audience to do at Netroots Nation: run for office. To make democracy work, we have to run, no matter how impossible the task seems.

That said, I want to lay out the problems to this. First, and foremost, it’s an incredible drain on resources; financial, physical, and emotional. People burn out, or they go bankrupt. Politics is exceedingly expensive. In a perfect world, we’d have public financing and everyone would work with similar resources. But the U.S. Supreme Court seems to be against that, so we have to deal with the fact that our elections are going to become more and more oligarchical. I don’t have the solution to that.

There’s also the grueling personal attacks. I’d love it if political campaigns were cordial affairs (what if candidates campaigned together?), but I recognize that they’re not. And the result is that they can be bitter, wounding attacks. This is because it’s far simpler to make personal attacks, because people connect more easily with emotional appeals, and because we have a news media which rewards the personal attack with coverage and a general blasé attitude. We shouldn’t deny it; the first hardcore “issues” article I read about the CD1 campaign was the Progressive Democrats presentations/questionnaires that both Mr. Cicilline and Mr. Gemma went through. And I’m jealous of our former editor Brian Hull (and the Progressive Dems) for getting it.

Furthermore, more and more candidates in a single race means our first-past-the-post system reveals its inherent flaw: it doesn’t take a majority to win. You only have the win the largest plurality. Which means elections can end with a candidate the majority of people actually don’t like winning. A simple reform would be to switch to instant runoff voting, but it’ll take a sustained campaign and a real threat that the RI Democratic Party might lose its grip for that switch to happen.

But even without changes in how we organize elections and how we cover them, we need candidates to be brave enough to stand up and speak out for what they believe in. We need them to argue with whatever assumptions currently stand; with the consensus. The consensus shouldn’t get to rest on its laurels, it should constantly have to strive to prove its worth. Ideally, Rhode Island should thrive on this sort of idea.

In some places, there’s an option for “none of the above”. Voters can reject all the candidates by selecting it; and it means that a new election is called with new candidates. Perhaps that’d be a more honest way of doing this; giving voters the chance to say “all of these options are unappealing to me.” But until that comes along, that’s what Anthony Gemma will be: an alternative to “none of the above”.

(The photo is the old guard of Democracy Matters, a group of us at the State House in early 2006 introducing that year’s Clean Elections bill)