Lessons from the Front-line Of Campaign Finance Reform

By Pete Wilson

On June 2nd, Big Labor succeeded in defeating California’s Proposition 226, which would have forbade unions and employers from spending money deducted from worker’s paychecks without members’ permission.

It was a hard-fought campaign, and 226’s opponents had to overcome a huge lead in the polls. How they did it is an object lesson for those of us interested in real campaign finance reform, and for future attempts to protect workers’ paychecks.

Before the campaign kicked into high gear, when 226 still enjoyed a commanding lead, and Big Labor’s big guns were as yet silent, I was asked, "How can the opposition possibly defeat this initiative?" I answered, "There’s only one way. That is if they totally misrepresent it, and falsely paint it as something that it isn’t among people who don’t know what it is."

And that’s exactly what they did.

They ran the nastiest, most negative, dishonest and deceptive campaign in California history. They accused Proposition 226 and its supporters of every kind of villainy, and predicted unmitigated catastrophe for California should it pass.

Californians were berated with charges that 226 would obliterate workplace safety standards, eviscerate the fire code, scrap Medicare and Social Security, increase pollution, defund private charities, privatize public education, weaken patient protections against HMOs, export American jobs, and lead to the repeal the 40-hour work week, child labor laws, and the civil rights protections.

But while these preposterous Chicken Little rants were among the most outrageous of their charges, they weren’t the most effective. That "honor" belongs to one particularly pernicious claims.

Playing in the basest way on people’s justifiable fear of crime and sympathy for law enforcement, they set up "phone banks" – a campaign term for what is really telemarketing – to call people at home and tell them that 226 would lead to the death of cops. How? The annual written permission forms mandated by 226 might become public records, so the "argument" went, and enterprising thugs might search said records for officers’ home addresses and target them for revenge. Needless to day, the phone bank callers didn’t tell their listeners that California law already contains a host of provisions that protect such information.

This charge surprised even me, and I had expected from the beginning that 226 would be subject to the most vituperative and baseless attacks. So lesson number one from 226’s defeat is, be prepared for anything.

Lesson two is, count on being outspent by a margin greater than the federal deficit at its height. I said early on that we would be outspent four to one. It turned we were outspent at least ten to one.

The unions poured upward of $30 million into their campaign. They would have spent $50 million, but they ran out of time. And their $30 million only bought them a seven point victory. If the race had gone on longer, their $50 million wouldn’t have bought them victory at all.

I have news for them: it is going to go on. The June election was just one round – a round they won, to be sure, but that cost them dear. We’re going to keep fighting. The grassroots activists that put 226 on the ballot – Mark Bucher, Jim Righeimer, and Frank Ury – have no intention of giving up or going away. Neither do I.

The unions are worried. They have good reason.

When an initiative similar to 226 passed in Washington State – by 72.9 percent – in 1992, unions saw contributions from members drop sharply. The lesson was clear: rank-and-file workers don’t want to pay for their bosses’ politics.

But the bosses didn’t give up so easily. A recent investigation revealed that the National Education Association (NEA) and its state affiliate, the Washington Education Association (WEA), illegally laundered more than $400,000 of teachers’ mandatory dues into a PAC set up to defeat two state education reform initiatives.

Reformers in Washington are fighting this, and other, illegal shakedown practices by unions. So far, they’re not getting much help from union-allied state officials.

But that shouldn’t deter those of us who want to see real reform, and end the shakedown. Or response to scofflaws can never be to throw up our hands in surrender, and resign ourselves to their wrongdoing. We must fight back with every just means within our power. We must stick to our principles and refuse to be bullied and intimidated by our opponents.

Winston Churchill once wrote that "no one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it."

So it is in political campaigns. 226 deserved to win because the principle it embodied, paycheck protection, is right and fair. It didn’t win because of the deception and distortion of its enemies.

We’re going to dispel those distortions and deceptions, and when we do, in the next paycheck protection fight, we’ll not only deserve victory, we’ll achieve it.

Mr. Wilson is governor of California.

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org