MB Civic

By Ruth Marcus | Wednesday, June 7, 2006; A23 | The Washington Post

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith died this year, but he left behind the conventional wisdom. Galbraith coined the phrase in 1958 to denote those comfortable ideas “which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability.”

Coincidentally, in the weeks after Galbraith’s death, I came across assaults on two pillars of the conventional political wisdom: that negative attack ads are bad and that disclosure of campaign finance information is good. Neither argument is ultimately convincing, but both serve as provocative warnings against the complacent repetition of accepted verities.

The first challenge comes in a book by Vanderbilt University political science professor John G. Geer, “In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns.” Geer disputes the notion that rampant negativity is a new phenomenon; the writers of the Declaration of Independence, he says, went negative in 70 percent of the document. He argues that, despite media fixation on the subject, modern voters are not “drowning in a sea of negativity.” Even in the 2004 presidential race, the most negative one in his analysis, Geer found equal numbers of positive and negative appeals.

In fact, Geer contends, negative advertising is a force for good, sharpening public debate and informing voters. Analyzing presidential campaigns from 1960 through 2004, Geer finds that negative advertising tends to be meatier than gauzy positive spots. Nearly three-quarters of the claims in negative ads involve issues, not attacks on candidates’ character or values.

Geer’s perspective is a valuable antidote to the usual hand-wringing, but his paean to negativity goes overboard. Geer counts only ads by the candidates themselves, not the rapidly proliferating spots from outside groups — the Willie Horton ad in 1988 or Swift Boat Veterans’ attacks in 2004 — with more freedom to be vicious. And he shies away from assessing the legitimacy of negative attacks, which may be moored to facts but wrenched entirely out of context.

Nor does he consider how the fear of being the target of a 30-second attack ad can distort policymaking. I attended a lunch with Geer on the very day the House of Representatives approved a sham lobbying reform bill with the help of jittery lawmakers who feared that a vote against the bill would produce ads assailing them as lobbyists’ handmaidens.

The fact that Geer’s analysis is limited to presidential campaigns, where negative attacks are somewhat constrained by the scrutiny they are guaranteed to draw, may diminish his damage assessment. Consider North Carolina, where Democratic congressman Brad Miller is the subject of a radio ad attacking his stances on gay rights and immigration. “If Miller had his way, America would be nothing but one big fiesta for illegal aliens and homosexuals,” says the ad, to the accompaniment of mariachi music. Hardly the high-toned issue-sharpening of Geer’s optimistic depiction.

If negativity’s negatives are part of the received wisdom, the value of disclosure is a veritable article of faith. In a recent paper, Democratic election lawyer Robert F. Bauer, my favorite campaign finance sparring partner, takes on the popular view of disclosure as an “efficient, relatively innocuous method of managing concerns about money in politics.”

The notion of disclosure as a useful tool for the well-informed voter, he says, is “almost quaint” in a data-drenched world where even the most diligent citizen can’t digest all the available information. Rather, disclosure has become the province of journalists and professional do-gooders who mine the data to produce a cynical — and cynicism-inducing — narrative of the pernicious influence of money on the political system.

Worst of all, according to Bauer, disclosure is increasingly a mere first step in the relentless march toward an ever-expanding regulatory regime governing political speech: “the stake that the state drives into the ground to mark out new territory.”

Bauer’s case in point involves 527s, the independent groups that drew attention in 2004, when financier George Soros lavished $24 million on efforts to oust George W. Bush, and when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth helped defeat John F. Kerry. Perhaps disclosure in those cases produced the cynicism that Bauer laments. But it can’t be that the political system would have been better off if such spending had been cloaked in secrecy, as was the case before Congress required reporting in 2000.

In the case of 527s, Bauer correctly argues, those disclosure rules only presaged demands for additional regulation; Congress is now considering legislation that would require these groups to abide by the same campaign finance rules as other players.

This is where Bauer and I part company: Congress was right when it moved to end unlimited “soft money” donations to political parties, and it would be wise — now that such activity has shifted to 527s — to act there as well. But the fact that some disclosure rules precede substantive regulation doesn’t mean that all such reporting requirements do, or should, lead to more. In some cases, sunlight is sufficient.

Writing nearly half a century ago, Galbraith described the “articulation of the conventional wisdom” as “a religious rite . . . an act of affirmation like reading aloud from Scriptures.” In that vein, Geer and Bauer proffer useful heresies. Negativity isn’t an unadulterated evil. Disclosure isn’t a panacea. But when it comes to these tenets, at least, the conventional hymnal contains a good deal of wisdom.