Parties eye new campaign option

Both Democrats and Republicans are considering the deployment of a powerful but risky new weapon in the fall presidential-election campaign.

The plan would let each party’s national committee set up a separate campaign group for spending unlimited amounts of “hard dollar” contributions on advertising and other activities for its presidential candidate.

“The pressure to use this new weapon arises in part because of McCain-Feingold’s closing of the ‘soft-money’ loophole,” said Larry Noble, a former Federal Election Commission general counsel.

What worries party and campaign officials, several say, is that the law forbids such separate units to coordinate their work with the rest of the national committee or the candidate’s campaign creating both legal and political risks.

Under the campaign-finance law passed last year, for the first time in the history of American elections, illegal coordination carries criminal penalties, rather than the fine and slap on the wrist that used to apply.

“Nobody wants to be accused of coordinating and be the first person hauled before a court of justice on this,” said Evan Tracey, chief operating officer of TNSMI/Campaign Media Analysis Group, which monitors campaign-ad spending.

The Supreme Court in December left standing the McCain-Feingold ban on “soft money” federally unregulated contributions to parties that can be used for any purpose while tightening rules on coordination between a candidate’s campaign and his party’s “hard money” election efforts.

As a result, this is the first year that the national party can neither coordinate ads supporting its candidate nor use soft money to help foot the bill.

The resulting vacuum would be filled by a separate hard money campaign unit, which the Democratic National Committee says it is seriously considering. The Republican National Committee says it, too, has such a plan under review, but would deploy it only reluctantly.

“All of our options are on the table, and no final decisions have been made,” Josh Wachs, chief operating officer of the Democratic National Committee, told The Washington Times.

“We are keeping our options open and will continue to discuss the various factors ground game, turnout, 72-hour task force, party-building and advertising and marshal our resources accordingly,” Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said.

Use of the new weapon is risky because it would force a campaign’s strategists to surrender control over the timing and content of some of their TV advertising message a potentially ruinous result in the closing days of the general election. Republicans are still apologizing for the 1988 “Willie Horton” TV ad against Michael Dukakis that a pro-GOP independent group ran, using soft money, when election law forbade coordination with such outside groups.

Fearing loss of message control, Republicans say they would employ the new weapon only to keep from being blown out of the water if the Democrats set up such a unit. But Democrats say they suspect the RNC and Bush campaign have intended to go with the new weapon ever since Mr. Bush last month declared an end to fund raising for his campaign’s coffers and began raising money for the RNC.

Outside critics see another problem.

“It means that the parties will spend unlimited amounts on their publicly funded candidates, where the whole idea of public funding was that if you accept public money, you agree to spending limits, including what each party can spend,” said Mr. Noble, the former FEC official who now heads the Center for Responsive Politics.

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