The Maverick Tribe

My friend Philip floats the idea of conditional campaign donations (from thismodernworld.com)

Has anyone been discussing starting to put donations for Obama’s 2012 run in escrow, to be released upon the accomplishment of certain goals—eg, on Iraq, health care, energy, etc.?

It would take a ton of effort and wrangling to set up. And I haven’t thought it through at all, particularly the various legalities involved. Just off the top of my head, I think you’d have to set up a vote on whether he’d succeeded and the money could be released. I’d also guess you’d might have to require each person to specify a second choice organization for the money to go if Obama fails, so they wouldn’t just get it back and be able send it to the campaign anyway.

Interesting thought experiment but I don't think much more than that.  Accepting campaign donations contingent upon accomplishing certain goals amounts to making a pledge.  ("I take a pledge not to raise taxes", "I pledge to guarantee health care to every American", and so on.)  Perhaps they'd be even more coercive than mere pledges, since politicians tend to value cold, hard cash above that fluid, airy-fairy currency known as integrity.

So if conditional campaign donations are like pledges, only more effective, what's wrong with them?  They're a bad idea for the same reason that pledges are almost always a bad idea in politics.  A politician taking a pledge is performing an act of ideological hubris.  If elected, the politician needs to face changing real world conditions.  Fine, so you're a lefty that wants to ensure that America gets out of Iraq in X months.  But what about constantly changing facts on the ground over just the last year?  Do you really want to enforce such rigidity in foreign policy?  Foreign policy needs to be flexible and adaptive to be effective.  And if that doesn't bother you, imagine what the Republican activists would do with their conditional donations.  Republicans who wanted to get through the primary would undoubtedly need to pledge not to raise taxes.  (Many already do this, but don't currently have to put their money where their mouth is.)  But sometimes taxes need to be raised, no matter your ideology.  If George H.W. Bush had been beholden to a large sum of campaign cash in addition to that famous fiscal promise that rolled off his lips in 1988, would he still have raised taxes?  And if he hadn't, would the country be better or worse off?

Barack Obama faced a similar dilemma in the run up to this year's election.  Back in his days of ideological purity on campaign finance, he made a pretty clear promise to accept public funds in the general election if his Republican counterpart agreed to as well.  Then he built a staggering fundraising machine based on mostly small, grassroots internet donors.  The whole premise of public financing (preventing disproportionate power by a few moneyed interests) had been largely obviated.  But to carry this remarkably democratic donor base into the general election, Obama had to break his promise.  (His explanation for doing so, that the campaign finance system was "broken", was pretty lame.)  It was, in my view, the lowest point in his campaign.

It is understandable that the extremes of each party would welcome the opportunity to have a money-back guarantee.  Indeed, it's always a bit tragic watching our leaders have to voice squarely partisan views during the primary and then tack to the center in the general.  But the problem is not that elected leaders are insufficiently beholden to their base - it's that they're too beholden.  Just because the far-left/far-right position is articulated before the centrist position does not make it the more legitimate one.  It just makes it the first one.