Money and the Senate race

By CHARLES J. ABBOTT

LITERATURE is a search for the significant detail, the descriptive item that provides insight. Take this scene-setter by Raymond Chandler:

"It was about 11 o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars."

Chandler nails down every detail of his character, a hard-nosed detective peering into seamy opportunism in southern California. Chandler's detective would tell us nothing metaphorical if he came to Washington. We'd get every sordid and physical detail. He'd give us each scrap of gossip from inside and outside the beltway that circles this "company town."

He would set up some brilliant scene to show the significance of the beltway barrier that separates the calmer outlying regions from the turbulent center.

That center is a company town; the industry is politics and government. Survival there depends on winning elections, and winning elections almost always means having more money in your campaign than your challenger. People play by the rules and know how to use them, but the rules keep changing. As a result, nothing about campaign funding is quite as definite as it may seem. Reporters attempt to uncover all the significant detail and to tell the rest of the nation what we discover. Could one evocative detail describe the money gathering by U.S. Senate campaigns?

Look at the Senate race in Illinois. The latest Federal Election Commission report from Judy Koehler, the Republican nominee, says she has raised $336,901 this year, including $66,899 in loans, and had $34,459 in cash on June 30. She was well below the average for a Senate challenger, but the campaign reports do not mention that her largest single helper will be the Republican National Senatorial Committee (RNSC).

The RNSC promises to put $753,456 into Koehler's race. That's the maximum allowed by federal law, based on a formula that includes Illinois' voting age population plus inflation and multiplied by two because the state GOP signed over its donation rights to the RNSC. The money does not appear on Koehler's reports because she never sees it. The most a party committee can give in cash to a candidate is $17,500. The rest of the $753,456 is "coordinated expenditures" which can cover polling, advertising, research work, travel expenses, postage, salaries, bumper stickers and a whole lot more. (There is some speculation the NRSC provided without charge to Koehler's campaign the material for attacks during the primary election about Sen. Alan J. Dixon's attendance record. Democrat Dixon of Belleville laughed at GOP efforts to "keep me loose" and then said he has the best record for an Illinois senator in modern times.)

With the RNSC's help, Koehler, a three-term state representative from Henry, is nearly even with Dixon in finances. But the RNSC paid the bill for $300,000 in TV ads for Koehler in May. In July it was splitting the $15,000 a week cost of her radio advertising. "They have assured us they will max out," Koehler press secretary Jim Gray said.

Dixon's treasury

No one should feel sorry for Dixon. As the incumbent, he has raised $1 million this year and had $847,925 in cash on June 30 — a handy sum with the notably expensive final months of campaigning still to come in a big state. A Dixon spokesman said that the only aid Dixon would get from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee was the maximum cash donation of $17,500. "It will be a pleasant surprise if they can do more. We don't expect it," he said.

Common Cause, the self-styled citizens' lobby that wants to limit the role of a major source of campaign funds, the political action committees (PACs), has analyzed senatorial campaign finances over a longer period. It shows Dixon raising $1.49 million since January 1, 1985, compared to $380,971 for Koehler. By June 30 this year, Dixon had received $640,430 from PACs and Koehler $37,154.

Dixon and 13 other senators have already exceeded the previous mid-summer record for PAC contributions held by Charles H. Percy, Illinois' GOP senator until Democrat Paul Simon beat him in 1984. Percy had collected $611,503 from PACs in mid-summer 1984, according to Common Cause.

Is winning a U.S. Senate seat only done with money? "Hardly anyone wins without it," one campaign veteran said. Officeholders almost always raise more money than challengers and, for whatever reasons (ability and experience?), they rarely lose. They are a safe bet for a contributor.

Challengers try hard to influence the influential in Washington, D.C. Nearly every candidate for the U.S. Senate comes to town to try to tap the PACs and politically active people. It's part of the way you play by the rules in the game of perceptions, and Washington can wind up influencing elections hundreds of miles away.

"You end up conducting several campaigns," said one Illinois Republican, describing how he tried to operate congressional races while making trips to Washington to keep the party and the PACs convinced that victory was likely. "They [the congressional campaign committees of both parties] have a lot to say about how much money you get from the PAC world and how much you get from the regular party .... If they get [mad] at you, they shut it off. They've got you by the throat.'' The senatorial and congressional campaign committees are a font of details. They mail out newsletters capsulizing progress in races or reprints of newspaper stories; they help educate campaign workers (the Republican National Congressional Committee at one point had its own academy to train campaign managers, finance directors and press secretaries for House campaigns); they help point candidates at campaign consultants and suggest to donors where help is needed. Several times this year the Republican National Congressional Committee (RNCC) set up day-long sessions for candidates to talk to cabinet-level officers and included a drop-in by President Reagan and press interviews on the White House lawn.

August & September 1986/IIlinois Issues/71

Judy Koehler

Alan Dixon

"Our job is not to run the campaign. Our job is to advise and counsel when they [the candidates] ask," an RNSC spokeswoman said. The senatorial and congressional campaign committees even run off-the-record briefings with reporters in which operatives zoom through every race, pausing to explain why their challenger has a chance or why an incumbent is unassailable.

Soft money

The parties can wheel in assistance another way, with what is called soft money because it does not count against a specific candidate. For instance, GOP officials on June 27 in St. Louis said that the RNSC and the Republican National Committee plan to put $10 million into states with close Senate races. The device is within the rules for giving money to state and local GOP organizations for "party-building activities," such as registration drives, direct mail campaigns, absentee voter campaigns and development of computerized voter lists. (Republicans generally are conceded to be ahead of Democrats in using computers to do things such as sorting through donor and voter lists.) The intended result is a larger GOP turnout that incidentally helps candidates in close races.

The Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee run their own shows, too. The Democrats, for instance, in April ran radio spots in the Midwest to try to get dissatisfied farmers to vote Democratic. The Republican National Committee spent $300,000 on appeals to Hispanics during the Cinco de Mayo (May 5) celebration, and committee chairman Frank Fahrenkopf pointed out that the GOP committee since 1982 "has been feeding Spanish news actualities to Spanish-language radio stations and networks across the country."

All this wizardry does not always work. The Republican National Congressional Committee in June tried to hit House Democrats, including Reps. Lane Evans (D-17, Rock Island) and Terry Bruce (D-19, Olney) on a farm bill vote. Each target was named in a separate press release, but the headline on all of them was "GOP SAYS BLANK LEAVING FARMERS IN LURCH."

Common Cause filed suit in federal district court in Washington, D.C., on June 30 to force the Federal Election Commission to write rules on "soft money." Common Cause says that soft money allows evasions of election laws because donors can give more money than the usual $1,000 or $5.000 limit for a race, and that it could allow corporations or unions to donate money that ordinarily would not be legal.

Congress also is looking at camoaign finance laws. Common Cause's favorite plan is to limit the amount of money a candidate can accept from PACs, who now number about 4,000. Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) is the leader in the crusade for limits with a bill that also would drop the amount a PAC can give to a candidate. Boren's bill limits each PAC to $3,000 per candidate, instead of the current $5,000. "PACs are running wild in Congress," Common Cause president Fred Wertheimer said in a July 26 report that detailed PAC contributions to the 87 candidates for U.S. Senate this year. They have received $24 million from PACs, compared to $14.6 million at the same point in 1984. In 1984, PACs gave $113 million to House and Senate candidates, and incumbents got 70 percent of it.

A different approach to preventing undue influence in campaigns from PACs or any other interest is public financing of Senate elections. Illinois' Sen. Paul Simon (D-Makanda) and Sen. Charles Mathias (D-Md.) are sponsors of the proposal. The money would come from an income tax checkoff, just like the presidential check-off, and would be allotted according to the number of votes in a state. In Illinois, a candidate would get $2.5 million for the general election campaign. "What we're trying to do is put more public interest in elections and less special interest," Simon said when the bill was filed last October. The Simon-Percy race in 1984 cost $10 million, and Simon says that he spent one-third of his time plumping for money.

Simon also is a realist. He set up his own PAC, The Democracy Fund, after his Senate election. It has raised close to $300,000, director Rosemary Crippen says, but it has helped candidates around the country. "Our main purpose is to have the Senate go Democratic," she said. Next year. Simon's PAC will start salting away cash for his 1990 race. "Simon is smart to have this office. Raising money is a fulltime job," Crippen said.

Money indeed can make the difference in getting newspaper space or air time, but it is only part of the camapign: The candidate has to have something to say. There are frequent examples of campaigns that had money but no spirit or ideas. That grist is needed. Chandler would agree.

72/August & September 1986/Illinois Issues