Published 01 July 2004

(word count: 750)

Every Sunday morning I have breakfast with Molly Ivins.  One scrambled egg, two bacon strips, half a grapefruit, and several column inches of nationally syndicated Molly washed down with a liberal swill of artificially flavored reconstituted orange-like breakfast beverage.

Molly is a liberal's liberal.  She's a consistent Bush-bashing Kerry-Kisser.  She'll unswervingly love the Left and rip the Right.  She will knee-jerkedly deify Democrats and repudiate Republicans.  If I'm ever commissioned by Mad magazine to write a lampoon of long lost liberal lefties, all I need do is plagiarize the predictable "progressive" predilections of Molly Ivins.

Molly was on a Clean Money crusade the other morning.  The Clean Money concept of the Big Intrusive Government crowd claims that public funding of political campaigns can, in Molly's impassioned prose, "clean up politics and restore democracy in this country."

How exactly will criminalizing campaign contributions while forking over taxbucks to office-runners purify our politics?  The big fat-cat moneyed classes (always conservatives, according to liberal mythology) will no longer be able to buy special influence from the legislator classes.  No more lobbyists, no more special interests, no more professional panhandlers.

The next best thing Clean Money does is open the floodgates of candidates.  No more incumbents running unopposed because nobody can afford to contest them.  Molly quotes her sources who claim that Arizona and Maine, two states afflicted with "Clean Election" laws, have more candidates stumping for office and more competitively contested races than ever before.

Breakfast is over and now it's reality time.  Libertarians know there’s nothing clean about Clean Money.  Let’s call it what it really is – Stolen Money.

Why is it automatically better if all races are contested?  If one pol runs unopposed for dogcatcher using his own money, obviously nobody cares.  But somehow democracy is "saved" if six people spending six times his amount, all of it taken from taxpayers, stump for the same office.  And since all of them have the same base philosophy, that it’s okay to campaign on money stolen for them by the government tax-takers, we’re not even offered a diversity of ideologies.  Our choice is to vote for Tweedledee, Tweedledum, Tweedledope, Tweedledolt, Tweedledunce or Tweeledipwad.

Ms Ivins sums up her impending Clean Money Utopia this way: "One of the oldest sayings in politics is, 'You got to dance with them what brung you.'  What Clean Elections does is fix the system so that when people get elected, they got no one to dance with – no one they owe – except us, the people."

Really?  If all candidates are funded by taxpayer pelf will they really be waltzing with no one but us taxpayers?  Hardly.  They'll be completely beholden to the petty but politically powerful local election moneycrats, the ones who'll write – and rig – the rules when deciding who gets the loot and who doesn't.  Why should candidates care about us?  They'll get their campaign plunder no matter what "us, the people" think about them.

By confiscating cash from people’s pockets and sowing it as seed coin for campaign clones, Molly is belittling the very people she claims to champion, the long suffering taxpayers of America (that's "us, the people," remember).  Makes you wonder why liberals hate us so much.  Molly’s much-maligned conservative counterparts are no better, of course.  Flash the "free" funding in their faces and Clean Campaigns instantly become bipartisan projects.

Molly has identified the problem – lobbyists and special interests and professional panhandlers trading campaign cash for cozy legislation and handsome handouts from the country's coffers.  But she missed the cure – forcing every governmentcrat at every level, under threat of fine or imprisonment, to govern within the confines of their constitutions.  Eliminate the pork barrel and you instantly eliminate the lobbyist and the special interest and the professional panhandler.

So what are Ivins and her ilk really all about?  It seems that liberals and their conservative lib-alikes can't stand somebody making their own illiberal choices.  Apparently, a woman should have the right to choose whether to keep or kill her fetus but not the right to choose whose campaign she'll contribute to.  According to so-called Clean Election laws, Catholics will be forced to fund abortion rights candidates, lesbians will be coerced into coughing up cash for anti gay marriage nominees, and Molly, bless her great big socialized altruistic liberal heart, will be forced by the taxcrats and the coercive election laws to finance the campaign of a fundamentalist hard right guns-and-God prayer-in-public-schools Republican!

Good Golly, Ms Molly, are you sure you know what you're advocating?