Hello folks, Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sid Radhakrishnan and I am delighted to be one of the many guest bloggers over the summer. These are exciting times in American politics. As a young college Republican, going to Iowa to campaign for Obama was one of the formative moments of my maturation. All of us in Iowa expected the thing to be wrapped by New Hampshire and at the latest by Super Tuesday. Today, from Venice Beach, California, I watched Hillary's concession with two staunch Clintonites. After hearing her speak, we all agreed that she would make...

In a landmark decision, the California State Supreme Court ruled that California's ban on same-sex marriage - in place for 31 years - is unconstitutional. The narrow 4-3 victory is cause for celebration in cities across the state. However, a dark cloud looms. The history of the LGBT movement in the US shows that no great victory goes unchallenged. Already, opponents of marriage equality have submitted 1.1 million signatures to the Secretary of State in an attempt to place a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriages on the November ballot. Of the 1.1 million signatures submitted, 694,538 must be verified to...

I almost don't even know what to say about this. Chaplain Drollinger, of Capitol Ministries, holds Bible study meetings for lawmakers in Sacramento at the Capitol. Recently, however, he has taken it upon himself to denounce another fellowship group, insisting that their interfaith composition is "disgusting" to God. I have to admit overwhelming curiosity as to Drollinger's opinion on the same-sex marriage decision expected in the coming weeks. If he is this upset over other worshiping Christians, I can only imagine the dim view he takes of allowing the queer community any social dignity. To their credit, lawmakers from both...

As unimaginable as it may have been a year ago, we are now presented with a new front runner in the democratic primary race -- a once in a generation candidate, Barack Obama. His novelty as a candidate brings much to the imagination. A blank slate, he is like a fun coloring game to a 3-year old. You can throw anything at him and it will be good. He transcends race, when he gains support amongst southern white voters. Yet he also does not transcend race, when at least 80% of african-americans persistently vote for him. He is to the...

Isaac Chotiner of The New Republic claims that Obama has not made a significant effort to capture the sub-sub-group voters. In the California primary on February 5th, Hillary Clinton won by a 3-1 margin in the Asian American vote. More publicized was her victory of the Latino vote. Chotiner offers up various reasons for Obama's inability to get more Asian American support: the Clinton's popularity in the '90's, California's battles over affirmative action, and immigrants' desire for stability over "change." The most interesting reason to me was that in his effort to become a post-racial candidate, Obama uses dichotomous language...

Tuesday’s primary marked the beginning of the end for some Republican candidates and the clearest indication yet that the Democrats will have to wait for some time to inaugurate their candidate. I stuck with CNN for all my coverage since they’re the only major network that broadcasts on the internet (no TV for me). CNN’s coverage of the election was consistent with what you’d expect based on their history. For the Republicans, the network anchors appeared shocked when Mike Huckabee won delegates in Southern States even though his personality and policies align closely in that region. It’s disappointing that the...

Last week, CNN aired ‘Czar Putin”, a report on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s accumulation of power since his ascension to the Kremlin in 2000. Coinciding with the Russian Parliamentary Elections held over the weekend, the program gave attention to something many engaged in that region have known for a long time – Russia’s window of opportunity for a healthy democracy is closing fast, if not already shut tight. While Putin has methodically morphed fledgling democratic institutions into something much closer to dictatorship, the scarier aspect of Russia is the popular approval of his Presidency, fueled by resurgent Russian nationalism. A recent...

By accepting a donation of about $130,000 in carbon offsets from the publicity-starved – and San Francisco based! – Planktos International, the Vatican this summer became the world’s first “carbon neutral” nation. The offsets will go toward planting trees in Hungary and will no doubt have a beneficial, but tiny and temporary, impact on the area’s economy. Hmmm… Not wholly unlike the effort’s impact upon climate change which, as we’ve recently been told, is unavoidable and will be, by any measure, catastrophic. However, as tempting as it is to… • deprecate Planktos’ flagrant PR-mongering • dismiss their primary business model...

Standing under what is probably the only oak tree left in Oakland, I could see the large white City Hall building in front of me. I could also see thousands of people of different ages and races, mostly of the middle class-looking variety. What I couldn’t see was Barack Obama during his twenty minute speech. He spoke clearly and with less polish than some politicians, covering most of the typical topics. I appreciated that he laid out his ideas in a way that was understandable. Domestically, he wants to do certain things. However, he can’t do them until we get...

With Animal Liberation (1973), Peter Singer launched the animal rights movement. Twenty years later, a professor at Princeton and one of the most influential philosophers of our time, Singer continues to play the traditional intellectual in a flagrant, almost obtuse way. He does not miss an opportunity to unsettle our ‘self-evident’ truths and challenge our thought processes. In sum, his writings will not leave you indifferent and I highly recommend them. On January 26 Singer wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in favor of medical intervention to keep a severely mentally impaired 9-year old girl, Ashley, from...

Not long ago our esteemed classmate Claire Michaels asked a provocative question: is liberal ideology a fairytale? The text of her e-mail follows: I'm reading this book called On Beauty by Zadie Smith, and there's a part where two black characters are talking about affirmative action, and the conservative one says: "Kiki, if there's one thing I understand about you liberals, it's how much you like to be told a fairytale. You complain about creation myths-but you have a dozen of your own. Liberals never believe that conservatives are motivated by moral convictions as profoundly held as those you liberals...

In 1964 Phillip Converse wrote his ground breaking work, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics", in which he challenged the idea that most people have structured, coherent opinions on which they base their political decisions. Forty years later this topic still seems to be fascinating to some and scary to others: a recent book, "The Myth of the Rational Voter", by Bryan Caplan attempts to shed new light on the issue, while Arnold Kling worries about "Two Strategies for avoiding Truth". However, to what extent is it (or was it ever) reasonable to expect that the 'average citizen'...

On January 11th, the House of Representatives for the second time approved – it was first passed in 2006, and subsequently vetoed – a bill to allow federal support for research using stem cells extracted from leftover embryos that fertility clinics would otherwise discard, in an attempt to end a funding moratorium initiated in 2001 by the Bush administration. Stem cell research involves extracting stem cells from human embryos that are a few days old. The embryos are destroyed in the process, raising important ethical questions about the sanctity of human life and whether it is appropriate to use human...

In the most recent print issue, Sheila Bapat asked the question "Do clean money elections give women a better chance of winning?" (You can read the full article by clicking the link on the left.) One of the women discussed in the article, Gabrielle Giffords, is performing so well in her bid to replace retiring House member Jim Koble that the other party has abandoned advertising for her opponent. However Giffords has never run "clean". The former state senator, argued in the article that "As a Democrat and as a woman, I feel it is important that I build a fundraising base." This seems to be paying off for her. She has transitioned her success fundraising and building support at the state level to Federal races, which are never "clean elections".

Speaking of money in politics, the Sacramento Bee has an informative graphic spread today on the 3 major gubernatorial candidates, their war chest, and the sources of their funding. Interesting how Angelides is not far behind Arnold in the proportion of his funding from entertainment interests. It's also useful in that it illustrates the argument that self-funded candidates are less beholden to special interests (although notice how even millionaires like Schwarzenegger and Angelides are only willing to self-fund at most 20% of their respective campaigns).

Today, the California Nurses Association began collecting signatures to place a "clean elections" proposition on the November ballot. Were the initiative only about publicly-funding the campaigns of candidates without deep-pocketed friends, it might actually do the state some good; but instead, it tacks on even more stringent contribution limits to all candidates, whether they opt-in to the campaign finance scheme or not. Far from encouraging more grassroots candidates, the CNA's proposal would lead to even more of the very candidates they seek to avoid: millionaires.

Almost 10 years ago, Jonathan Rauch wrote a prescient article in National Journal entitled "Campaign Finance - Blow It Up." "Probably no American public policy," he said, "is a more comprehensive failure than campaign finance law." Rauch argued that, no matter what, money would find its way into politics like water, and that any attempt to hold the flood back would not only be futile, but would also lead to perverse results, among them higher-premiums on rich, self-funded candidates and shadowy organizations only nominally independent from the campaigns they supported. His solution was an all-or-nothing approach: give all candidates the option to either raise unlimited amounts of cash from whomever they wished with full and rapid disclosure, letting voters, not bureaucrats, judge propriety, or be freed almost entirely from the burdens of fundraising by fully funding their campaigns with public money.

The powerful California Nurses Association embraced one half of Rauch's idea on Monday and abjectly disposed of the other, beginning a petition drive Tuesday to place a "clean elections" law on the November 2006 ballot. Their proposal, called the "Clean Elections Campaign Reform Act" (CECRA), is a combination of introducing "full" public campaign financing for statewide candidates (funded by an increase in the corporate tax rate) and drastically lowering contribution limits to non-participating candidates. You can view the full-text here.

Here's how it would work: if you wished to opt-in, you'd need to raise contributions of $5 in numbers ranging from 750 for an Assembly candidate to 25,000 for a gubernatorial hopeful. Once certified, your public funding would likewise depend on what office you sought, and whether you were competing in a primary or a General election. Gubernatorial candidates, for example, would receive $10 million for the primary and $15 million for the General. As a point of reference, both Phil Angelides and Steve Westly had spent about $6 million each through March 17, with much, much more in their respective coffers. Independent and non-participant expenditures used against you that exceed these initial figures will be matched by the state.

Meanwhile, the Act would lower individual contribution limits to $500 for legislative candidates and $1000 for statewide offices. Again, as a point of reference, the current limit for the Governorship stands at $20,000. Contributions by lobbyists and contractors would be banned, though I can't imagine that either wouldn't find some loophole to exploit

So what's the problem? Well, there are several...

First, as Greg Kato already mentioned in his previous post about a similar proposal in the Assembly, this system holds major party candidates to a different standard than third-party candidates and independents. The latter would have to raise twice the number of donations (50,000 for Governor) to qualify, and even then would only receive half the funds their Republican or Democratic rivals get for the same office. Any serious attempt to foster "clean" campaigns and greater electoral participation needs to set a level playing field for candidates. Treat everyone equally, period.

The second fatal flaw is the qualifying threshold. Twenty-five thousand donations for a gubernatorial candidate strikes me as a bit much for a system that's supposed to encourage grassroots democracy, to say nothing of the 50,000 donations you'd have to solicit if there's not a "D" or an "R" after your name. Ten thousand sounds more reasonable. Anything higher would be insurmountable without significant logistical funding on the candidate's part, counter-productive considering that the system aims to attract exactly those candidates without such funding.

Speaking of which, lowering the contribution caps to $1,000 for a gubernatorial candidate is just going to place a even bigger premium on self-funded candidates like, say, this one. Or this one. Or even this one. Maybe that's the idea that the nurses had in mind: since almost no one could raise sufficient cash to run for Governor off of $1000-maxed donations, the limits would effectively whittle down the types of candidates to two: publicly-financed and completely self-financed, a backdoor route to the Rauchian ideal. Now, some argue the rich aren't quite the threat to the Republic they may at first seem; after all, a millionaire is beholden to no one but herself. I would add: herself... and the source of her millions, and therein lies the dilemma. Few took pause at Steve Westly dipping into his eBay fortune to fund his own campaign, but what if he had made his windfall working for, say, Enron, or Halliburton? Plus, what of those candidates ideologically-opposed to campaign finance? Doesn't CECRA effectively declare, "Libertarians need not run (unless they're loaded)" ?

I should also mention that CECRA has ideas I like: matching the spending of non-participants, for example, and tying all the monetary thresholds and limits to inflation and registered voters; but the attempt to steer most candidates toward public financing by starving other funding options will backfire, I fear, and lead to a plutocratic nightmare. Let's end the legal quagmire of campaign finance once and for all. Give viable candidates the public funding they need to be competitive, and get out of the anti-democratic business of over-regulating electoral behavior. Let the voters decide the propriety, or lack thereof, of each candidate. This solution may lack the policy theatrics of categorizing money sources and enforcing contribution limits, but as any victim of quick sand will tell you, sometimes the struggle makes the problem worse, even fatal.

Greg I am not nearly as enthusiastic about the effectiveness of Clean Elections to fix the problems with money in politics. Clean money programs do more to obfuscate the influence of money in politics than eliminate it. While clean money programs will enable non-traditional candidates the opportunity to run for office (the upcoming issue of PolicyMatters carries an article describing how Clean Elections help women's chances running for office) I don't see how it will solve any of the real problems associated with money in politics.

The Clean Money Campaign is now in the California Senate. Assemblymember Loni Hancock (D) has introduced a bill to create publicly-funded campaigns in California, similar to Arizona and Maine. It passed the Assembly in February and is now working its way through Senate committees.

Sounds appealing, but would it work?

Attempts to operate intelligence gathering and sharing systems in obscurity put the entire homeland security mission at risk. Since 9/11, several scandals have suggested that public backlash can scotch programs. The solution is not to tighten the secrecy around these programs: almost nothing the government does is kept secret for long. Rather, federal and state officials must bring legislators, civil liberties groups, and the public into a wide-ranging political discourse on the appropriate level of domestic surveillance in a time of terrorism. Robust public debate, legislative oversight, and checks on agents will give our domestic intelligence efforts—which most observers consider necessary—a certain level of trust and resiliency to weather the snafus inevitable with new or newly-tasked bureaucracies.