Nation Topics - Caleb Rossiter | The Nation

If a definition of news is something that hasn't happened before,
readers of the New York Times may be excused for wondering why
the paper featured a front-page story on June 8 on the travails of a
Senate candidate from Oregon who spends hours a day cold-calling rich
strangers to ask them to contribute to his campaign. There's nothing new
about the terrible, time-consuming need for candidates to curry favor
with the donor class; readers may recall Caleb Rossiter's first-person
account of the numbing effects of fundraising for his 1998 Congressional
campaign.

The real news story is in Arizona and Maine, where Clean Elections laws
provide public funding for candidates who avoid fat-cat donors. In those
states more than 300 candidates for everything from governor to state
assembly are proving their political worth not by the size of their
campaign war chests but by their ability to attract the requisite number
of $5 contributors to qualify for public money. Participation rates have
nearly doubled compared with 2000, when Clean Elections systems had
their first run. In Arizona more than 80 percent of the statewide
candidates are participating in Clean Elections--including seven of
eight major candidates for governor and nearly half the legislature
contenders. In Maine two gubernatorial candidates, a Republican and a
Green Independent, have been certified for Clean Elections funding,
along with 206 so far of 375 candidates for the state legislature.

In the past few years the determined organizing of dozens of state
coalitions, led by Public Campaign in Washington, has chipped away at
the belief that we'll never get the special-interest money out of
politics. Adding new force to that effort, Senator John McCain, the
country's most prominent campaign reform advocate, recently announced
his support for his home state's Clean Elections system. In ads paid for
by the Arizona Clean Elections Institute, McCain says: "Clean Elections
works well to overcome the influence of special interests. It gives
Arizonans the power to create good government. Keep supporting Clean
Elections."

McCain's move has a significant local context: Right-wingers and
business interests are trying to undermine his state's pioneering
system. Clint Bolick has set up a state satellite of his conservative
Institute for Justice to go after public financing in the courts, and
former GOP Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Matt Salmon is
attacking Clean Elections as "welfare for politicians" and promising to
get rid of it if he's elected this fall. Activists tied to GOP
fundraisers have floated the idea of a ballot repeal initiative if they
can't get rid of Clean Elections by other means.

Outside Arizona McCain's announcement should end the notion that
Republicans can't stomach public financing. In fact, there is a clear
trend toward greater acceptance among GOP leaders, who are beginning to
understand the rank and file's revulsion at big money's corrupting
power. In recent years, Republican businessmen in Maine, veteran
legislators in Vermont, a sitting governor in Massachusetts (along with
the state party) and a slew of former elected officials from around the
country have expressed their support for public financing, along with a
host of politicians in those three states and Arizona. Now that McCain
has thrown his clout behind the cause, let's hope others will follow.

BAN THE CLUSTER BOMB

Caleb Rossiter reports: The coalition of anti-landmine advocates who
helped win the 1997 treaty banning the devices, which has been signed by
more than 135 countries, is now seeking to ban "submunitions"-- better
known as cluster bombs. These are beer-can-size fragmentation bombs
spewed out of huge air- or artillery-delivered canisters to blanket an area the size of two
football fields. Current US submunitions have a failure rate of about 5
percent, meaning a lot of duds are left lying around where
civilians--frequently children--will explode them and be killed or injured. Some activists call for a total ban of the
weapons, but at least attaching backup fuses costing $10 would reduce
failure rates to 1.7 out of 1,000. The landmine activists have helped
convince the major military powers to move forward on negotiations to
find a technical solution, under the aegis of the UN's Convention on
Conventional Weapons. Talks could begin this December. Meanwhile,
activists should demand that the Pentagon halt exports of high-failure
submunitions, update its current acceptable-failure standards and
replace the Air Force's stockpile of millions of high-failure
submunitions.

ISRAEL AND THE ICC

Israel's Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein has raised fears that
Israelis might be charged and indicted by the International Criminal
Court after it convenes July 1. He warned a Knesset committee that the
court could charge Israel Defense Forces soldiers with human rights
violations in Jenin or other cities during Operation Defensive Shield.
It could also indict Jewish settlers on the grounds that the settlements
are illegal. Rubinstein said IDF soldiers suspected of looting or other
misconduct have been charged by military courts and are thus exempt from
ICC proceedings, but he was worried about the court indicting settlers.

THE HEADLINE GAP

Washington Post: "'90s Boom Had Broad Impact: 2000 Census Cites
Income Growth Among Poor, Upper Middle Class"; New York Times:
"Gains of 90's Did Not Lift All, Census Shows." Times correction
of related, earlier story: "A headline yesterday about a study on income
inequality misstated the number of states in which the gap between rich
and poor has widened over the last two decades.... It is 44 states, not
5."

NEWS OF THE WEAK IN REVIEW

President George W. Bush surprised Brazilian President Fernando
Henrique Cardoso by asking, "Do you have blacks, too?" Condy (who's paid
to know things) rescued her boss by aptly observing that Brazil
"probably has more blacks than the USA."

In the summer of 1997 Amory Houghton, the "moderate" six-term Republican Congressman who represents my home county in upstate New York, cast a crucial vote against the "no arms to dictators" Code