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Ed Asner
Actor and activist
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: If California is run by special interest and their lobbyists, how do we counter their money?
Ed Asner: The elected official will not have to depend on that lobbyist for his next campaign. It's knocking the legs out of them for campaigning. So they can lavish all the money they want on the opposition, but the Clean Money Campaign will help to bring that politician, if he's a Clean Money candidate, up to the level, as Reagan used to say, "raising all boats," to that level that the lobbyists may well be plying the opposition to the legislator who votes against him.
Jim Clarke: In Maine they've recently passed legislation for basically a universal health care program. The legislators, particularly the Clean Money legislators, have said, We would have never been able to do that had the lobbyists and the health care industry been there paying for our campaigns.
Q: What do you expect to be the most compelling and widely heard argument against campaign finance reform?
Asner: Like any great idea or great candidate that comes along, the vast body of sluggards out there mentally and physically will say, "Can't work, can't work, can't work." "People will never buy it." "He's too good to win," or, "It's too good to win." So they won't put their money, their energy behind it, and they will talk themselves out of supporting it.
Clarke: There would be considerable opposition to this if it were put on the ballot. There's a very small group of people who are the major players, and they like it the way it is. The campaign against it would be a couple themes: One, "You mean to say you want me to pay these politicians to run for public office? They steal enough money as it is. Now we got to pay for their campaigns?" The second, "Oh yeah, I'm going to give public money so someone from the American Nazi party can run for public office."
Asner: I would put my ass on the line, so to speak, by saying, I'd rather have a Nazi speaking his mind in the legislature where I can see him than having ten legislators taking money under the table and subverting democracy in their way.
Q: Will Clean Elections differentiate between corporations and labor unions?
Clarke: There is a distinction. In order to qualify, you get the $5 contributions. The labor unions are better organized to go out and have their people go out and give those contributions. But we're trying to take the influence away from any particular group.
Asner: They can also, the corporations, go out and hire all kinds of ex-felons like Darrell Issa did and spend millions getting them to circulate petitions against it. The money can be used to offset anything a union can do in this day when unions are being made defunct all over the place.
Q: How will Clean Money and campaign reform impact the two-party system? Will it promote growth of alternative parties and candidates?
Asner: I think it'll promote multiple party systems. I cry for that to happen. I cry for an erosion and a success of the two-party system being reduced in its power and made stronger actually by the effectiveness of minor parties. And I think this type of proposal could even help that.
Clarke: I would also add too, that thanks to the efforts of the Legislature and the sweetheart deal that they did with the governor, we basically set the lines for redistricting so that everybody is in a safe seat for the next ten years. Clean money will be an opportunity for somebody to challenge in a primary election the sitting incumbent.
Q: What are the best ways we can prevent hostile incumbent legislators from undermining a Clean Elections initiative that passes?
Clarke: Massachusetts is a unique example; they did pass public-financing clean money with over two-thirds vote of the electorate, but they had a little different procedure, where voters passed something but it's still up to the Legislature to appropriate funding - and they wouldn't. They weren't able to raise enough money, and then in a midnight session this year the Senate budget committee penciled out the clean money program. The lesson learned is that we need to have significant support, at least within the legislature.
Asner: Some weeks ago there was a big chocolate gala thrown by the energy companies to honor the head of the energy committee in the assembly, Assemblywoman Reyes. Her committee was about to discuss bringing back regulation on energy; it was a thousand dollars a head. Was it a week or a month later that proposal was scratched and she, of course, was among those voting against it? It's a blatant example of what the big companies and the lobbyists are constantly doing to us.
Q: When that came for a vote in the committee, 11 of the 14 committee member simply did not vote, which is why the bill died. If television-advertising costs are the main reason for campaign financing, particularly in California, should we be promoting the Internet as the free medium for distributing messages?
Asner: Having just participated as a member of a minority in the Screen Actors Guild election, which was national, it's a very good example. The union establishment stated that there would be no minority report sent out with the information concerning the forthcoming election. All the propaganda coming out of the union was strictly pro-consolidation with the other unions. Any phone call to the union, you would be put on hold with a little music and then a commercial would come on for promoting the merger. The ballot itself contained two propaganda statement, one from the Screen Actors Guild and one from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists promoting the merger, never allowing a word from the con vote within the union, who had to resort to nothing but email to get their message out. That message was gotten out and the minority, the con vote, won. So it can be used effectively.
Clarke: I think the reason MoveOn.org polled on the presidential one, the first time that they did was an effective and interesting way to communicate a message, plus a number of the presidential candidates on the Democratic side were able to raise significant funds of money through the Internet. But television still is the major vehicle to do that, and it is still the major cost here in California. Over 50 percent of the amount of money that's spent in an election is spent for television advertising. Interestingly, over the past 20 years less and less time of free media is actually being given by the networks to cover candidates, and when they do cover them, they tend to put it on Sunday morning, or late night. What they are actually doing is forcing the candidates to buy media to get their message out, and it's self-serving.
Q: What would Lou Grant think of the way that media cover politics today? And what does Ed Asner think?
Asner: Lou Grant would feel the same way as Ed Asner; or, even more important, Ed Asner would feel the same way as Lou Grant. Look at any paper and what you see in terms of its sections: a whole section on capital, stock market. Where in that paper, unless a strike is impending, unless a layoff is about to occur, unless a company is folding and you automatically imagine the people who are going to be laid off.... The Los Angeles Times used to have a labor reporter; you could read about labor, limitedly, as opposed to the whole section devoted to stocks and bonds and capital. So there is a freeze-out. You cannot find equitable coverage in any paper, either on labor or across the board on candidates. Dennis Kucinich speaks gold when he campaigns for the presidency and I support him primarily; I know I feel very strongly that he can't win, but I want his words and his ideas to "utz" the other candidates. Yet there never is any coverage, or when there is he's regarded as a pie-in-the-sky individual and dismissed. I think Lou would agree with me. They dismiss as unimportant until finally that public - and that's what I think Clean Money would do - would create that groundswell so that the media could not dismiss those candidates.
Q: In Arizona and Maine, did voter registration rise after the passage of the clean candidate act? Also, did more of those newly registered voters actually vote?
Clarke: Voter turnout did increase, and voter registration did, too. It would be far better to receive 10,000 one-dollar contributions than one $10,000 contribution, because you'll get 10,000 votes. Anybody who makes a commitment to a particular candidate, even to give them a dollar, will tend to want to support that candidate and vote for them - and that's what public clean money does by involving people in those $5 contributions.
Asner: If we get more people off their ass in this country to vote, they will demand a greater responsibility from that candidate that they voted for. That it will create a greater thirst from the people for being more satisfied at least on the issues that they wish to be satisfied on. Let's face it, what is the percentage of incumbents being re-elected now?
Clarke: Ninety-five, 98 percent.
Asner: There is something sick about that.
Q: Is there a correlation between campaign finance reform and special interest money and the recall of Governor Gray Davis?
Asner: I have no love for Gray Davis. This is a horrible mess which he was a part of, but he inherited a lot of the dirt that Pete Wilson dug up for him. He's being made the scapegoat; as somebody wrote in the paper the other day, the Legislature is even more responsible for this $38 billion deficit, and if there should be a recall, it should be the recall of the whole Legislature. The electoral process in this state and the country needs improvement; it needs salvation. And yet I find this draconian method of removing a scapegoat bothers me.
