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House - Campaign Finance And Public Disclosure Board Form

Hi I'm Craig and this is Crash Course Government and Politics.And today we're going to try and untangle the mess that is the American political campaign.One of the things about the American political system that often confuses people who don'tlive in America is the way that our politicians run for office. There are two aspects in particularthat stand out about American political campaigns: their length and their expense. We're goingto look at both of these today and see that they're related but before we do we are goingto answer a burning question: why do we need political campaigns anyway? Theme Music If you ask one hundred people about the reason why we have political campaigns, you'll getwell, not a hundred but at least more than one answer. And you might work for Family Feud.Probably the best answer to this question though, is that we have political campaignsto provide voters with information they need to choose a candidate to represent them. So how do politicalcampaigns provide information? And what is a political campaign anyway? Let's go to the Thought Bubble.A campaign is an organized drive on the part of a candidate to get elected to an office.It's also the way we refer to the organization itself. For example, in 2012 we had the Obamacampaign and the Romney campaign. And each consisted of a campaign organization madeup of thousands of staffers and volunteers and all of their activities. Most campaignsare temporary, geared towards an election although both parties do have permanent professionalcampaign organizations. At the top level are the national committees, the DNC and the RNC.Can you guess what they stand for?These organizations coordinate all national campaigns, especially those for President.Each house of congress has a Republican and Democratic campaign committee. The individualSenate and Congressional committees are headed up by sitting members of the Senate and theHouse, and because these committees give money to candidates, their leaders are very popular.I find that I'm popular when I make it rain at parties.Campaigns provide information in a number of ways. The main thing they do is communicatewith the public, usually through the media which we'll discuss in greater depth in futureepisodes. The main stage of political campaigns is the organized event where candidates canpresent information about themselves and their policies directly through voters and speeches.These are known as stump speeches, although only rarely these days do candidates actuallyspeak on stumps, they have podiums and stages now.In addition to these events, candidates present the information by appearing on the TV, indebates, at town meetings, and in "impromptu" photo opportunities. They like to appear withmilitary hardware, too, although sometimes this can backfire, as in the case of Michael Dukakis in 1988.Campaigns can spread their messages through direct mail, press releases, news coverage,and through advertisements, often on the TV, which is like the internet, only less interactiveand has a lot of real housewives on it. Thanks, thought bubble.Nowadays, there are many more ways that candidates can reach out to voters. One way is throughemail. If you've ever given money to a candidate or a campaign, you can expect emails in ever-increasingnumbers as election day approaches, and we all love that. Candidates now take to Twitterto blast out information and individual candidates and their campaigns often have Facebook pages.There are even campaign ads made specifically for YouTube, although how their advertising algorithmworks is beyond me. It's weird to get a campaign ad for the Michigan Senate if you don't live in Michigan.One other way that campaigns communicate information is through raising money. Of course, theyneed money to pay for all the campaign ribbons and buttons and PA systems and folding chairsand tour buses and stump speeches and axes to chop down trees so they have stumps tospeak on. These things ain't cheap.Even more expensive are advertisements on the TV. A sitting president has an advantagehere in that he can usually get on TV whenever he wants and he'll have a chance to clarifyhis positions in the State of the Union Address. But even he has to spend money on ads.And raising money is another way to present voters with information because campaign solicitationsusually come with some policy piece attached to them. Almost every solicitation you getwill be somewhat targeted to one of your interests and tell you, or try to tell you, where thecandidate asking for your money stands on that issue.So you may have gotten a campaign solicitation and wondered, "Hey, why you need my money?"The unhelpful answer is that they need your money because campaigns are expensive. Butthen you might ask, "why are they so expensive?" Good question.Campaigns are expensive because they're huge, especially presidential campaigns; they needto reach 220 million people of voting age. Another reason they're expensive is becausethey're super long. Democrat and Republican candidates raise money, give speeches andcreate political action committees years before the election. It's ridiculous. I blame the eagle.Campaigns are also expensive because Americans expect them to be personal and this takestime and money. We like to see our candidates in person and have them show up in small townsin Iowa and New Hampshire, even though those states don't matter all that much in the grand electoral picture.Another reason campaigns are so expensive is that they rely increasingly on the TV andother visual media that cost a lot of money to produce. Gone are the days when WilliamMcKinley could sit on his porch in Ohio and have reporters come to him. Nowadays, evenwhen candidates get free exposure by appearing on nightly comedy shows, like The Daily Show,it still costs the campaign in terms of time, travel and probably wardrobe and makeup sothat they can look as good as I do. No makeup. Minimal wardrobe: no pants. Sorry, Stan.How expensive are campaigns anyway? Eh...very! In the 2008 presidential campaign both candidatestogether spent three billion dollars. In 2012 the candidates spent about a billion dollarseach, and outside groups spent a further four billion.And congressional elections weren't much cheaper, except when you consider that there were alot more of them. Combined, congressional races in 2008 cost about one billion dollars.All the money that gets spent on campaigns leads us inevitably to campaign finance rules,which were set up by Congress after 1970 and refined by the courts.We have campaign finance legislation because all that money pouring into campaigns surelooks like it raises the potential for corruption. Whether or not an individual's campaign contributionscan sway a congressman's vote is highly debatable but it certainly gives the appearance of improprietywhen a congressman who receives millions of dollars from the oil industry then works hardto weaken regulations on oil companies so that they can make more profit.Campaign contributions are not bribes, but they sure look like them to lots of people.Recognizing that campaign contributions could potentially influence the political process,congress passes the Federal Election Campaign act of 1971. This was the first law that putlimits on campaign spending and donations. It was further refined by the McCain-FeingoldCampaign Law in 2002, and by court decisions that refined the rules for campaign spendingand donations and provided a legal rationale for these limits.Until recently, the most important case on campaign finance was Buckley V Valleo. Thiscase established the idea that limits on campaign spending were problematic under the firstamendment because limiting the amount someone could spend on politics was basically limitingwhat that person could say about politics. Freedom of speech, y'all!According to the rules, individuals were allowed to donate up to $2500 per candidate and theirwas a total limit to the amount an individual could give. Donations to a party committee,which because they don't go to a specific candidate and thus seem less like bribes, were limited to $28,500.Individual donors were also allowed to give up to $5,000 to a political action committee, or PAC.But it gets more complicated. Individuals and PACs are allowed to give unlimited fundsto a 527 group, named after its designation in the tax code, that focuses on issue advocacy.The most famous 527 group in recent political memory is probably Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which spentmore than 22 million dollars to raise awareness around the issue of whether 2004 presidential candidate,and later Secretary of State John Kerry was completely honest about his Vietnam War record.If this sounds like it was more of an organization against the candidate himself, well you can see whythe line between "issue advocacy" and support for a political campaign can be kind of blurry.Now here's something important: these limits are on contributions to candidates and campaigns,not on spending by candidates and campaigns. What this means is that a candidate and theircampaign can spend however much they raise. So if a candidate running for office has onebillion dollars, they can spend one billion trying to win. There's no concern about self-funded candidatesbribing themselves, and you often see very rich people spending a lot of their own money trying to win office.So Buckley Vs. Valleo set up the basic distinction between campaign donations, which could belimited, and campaign spending, which couldn't. This distinction was undercut by the SupremeCourt in the case of Citizens United Vs. the Federal Election Commission in 2009. This reaffirmed the ideathat money is the equivalent of speech and struck down many of the limitations on campaign donations.The Citizens United decision cleared the way for Super PACs. These organizations are allowedto raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to promote a candidate or publicize a cause,but they may not directly contribute to a candidate or coordinate with a campaign. Inthe 2012 election, there were over 500 registered super PACs and 41 of them spent over halfa million dollars. The largest seven had spent over 256 million by the end of August, oneof the reasons that the 2012 election was the most expensive ever, clocking in at around 6 billion.Now this sounds like a lot of money, right? It is. Gimme it. But a little context: thetotal spent on house and senate races was around 3.6 billion dollars, which was lessthan half of what Americans spend annually on potato chips. So when you look at it thisway, the amount we spend on elections doesn't seem like so much, which may make us rethinkthe idea that money is corrupting American politics. Or maybe not. Maybe potato chipsare corrupting American politics. Certainly corrupting my belly.American political campaigns are big and high stakes and raise questions about the influenceof money in politics that are tough to answer. On the one hand, it does seem like there'sthe potential for very rich people to have a lot of influence on the elections. On theother hand, limiting a person's ability to register his or her preference of a candidatethrough spending on that candidate does seem like a limitation on their political speech.One of the arguments for limits on campaign contributions is that forcing candidates toraise money in small amounts from a large number of donors will make them reach outto larger numbers of constituents, and appealing to large numbers is the essence of Democracy.But it's also time consuming for a politician to reach out to all those potential donorsand congressmen already spend a considerable amount of time raising money when they shouldbe legislating. And watching Real Housewives. And eating Little Caesar's. There's a lot to do.But this is the system we have, and unless congress passes a law limiting campaign expenditures,or shortening the campaign season, we can expect campaigns to remain long and get moreand more expensive. Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.Crash Course Government and Politics is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios. Supportfor Crash Course US Government comes from Voqal. Voqal supports non-profits that usetechnology and media to advance social equity. Learn more about their mission and initiativesat Voqal.org. Crash Course was made with the help of all of these campaign financiers.Thanks for watching.