OK here's number seven, followed by an afterword -- after it, of course, or else it would be a foreword....

No. 7: Control the destructive effects of television advertising on national politics.

All professional politicians in the United States know about the invisible 800-pound gorilla over in the corner: It’s called television. The way to win statewide and national office these days is to buy more and better TV advertising than your opponents. To do that, you have to raise really huge amounts of money to buy air time and hire the professionals who make the ads. To do that, you’ve got to devote an inordinate amount of time and staff to fund-raising that would be better spent talking and listening to voters, and to thinking about and planning how to actually govern if elected.

 
Worse, having to raise all that money raises troubling questions about corruption. There are only so many places a candidate can get huge sums of money, and all those places have vested interests in the outcomes of important policy debates. Money usually buys access to politicians, not actual decisions; those who hold otherwise are more cynical than realistic. Still, the system isn’t healthy, and it’s getting worse. It’s not a good thing when industries that contribute to political campaigns get to have their staff people essentially draft legislation pertaining to their own industry. And the campaign finance reform we’ve had in recent years, almost everyone agrees, has made things worse, not better.

There is actually an easy way to alleviate, if not solve, this problem—though it is, admittedly, politically difficult to achieve. It has two interconnected parts.

The first part is to have the Federal Communications Commission auction off rather than give away all broadcasting and bandwidth resources, not just some of them as is now the case. The companies that acquire broadcasting licenses are not exactly pauperized; they can well afford to pay for this relatively scarce resource—and that’s exactly what broadcasting bandwidth is. The money earned from these auctions and license renewals could then be used to subsidize political campaigns and help educate voters, just as happens in lots of other democratic countries.

The only way this works out fairly is if the time for active campaigning is constrained—this is the second part. Almost every other Western electoral democracy does this. There is nothing anti-democratic about it. It does limit free speech in some theoretical way, but the way things work now, with money dominating the process so completely, limits free speech for lots of candidates in a very real, not just theoretical, way. So the FCC should require all of its clients to allow a certain minimum of air-time during constrained official campaign seasons for all candidates who qualify to get on the ballot.

This is not a panacea. Candidates with lots of money could still buy more advertising during the campaign period, but those without a lot of money would be guaranteed a minimum of exposure to explain their proposals and views. We shouldn’t try to sterilize the advantages of money in politics, which is impossible anyway; but we shouldn’t want money to trump absolutely everything all the time, either.

So, sell the licenses to subvent free and fair political debate, and limit campaign seasons to curtail costs. This is a much simpler solution than those trying to limit and measure political contributions, whether of “soft money” or “hard money” and so on and so forth. Most such proposals, as with McCain-Feingold, are inherently too complex to be workable, because there are a zillion lawyers eager to make billions of dollars finding millions of ways around them. Proposals for a voluntary public funding system make a certain amount of sense, but the fact that they have to be voluntary to be constitutional limits their utility.

Besides, if the core problem is television—and it is—then the best solution is a direct one aimed at putting some boundaries around television’s functions in political campaigning. You can’t affect the position of a shadow by doing things to the shadow; likewise, we can’t do much about the shadow cast by television’s power. We have to get at the source.

And now the afterword, which connects my mention of David Korten the other day with David Brooks' column today with the fact the someone in Oregon just bought my old copy of Kirkpatrick Sales' book Human Scale, published back in 1980. And connected, too, to what I wrote on February 10 about cycles and bicycles. If I look just behind me I see a row of about 20 books I bought and read in the 1970s and early 1980s about ecology as a public policy paradigm. A lot of these books, including Human Scale, were a little flaky and impractical. Most of them, actually.  But, you know, looking back, they had the big idea right. It's taken more than 30 years for the reality of it to finally ooze through the the more mainstream among us. But I think it's actually happening. Maybe. And what is so sweet about it is that the recognition of what's gone wrong does not look any more conventionally liberal than it looks conventionally conservative. That old language, as I have said, is virtually obsolete. Maybe I'll re-read some of that old 1970s stuff--before it's all been sold away on Amazon!