Take It to the Limit - and Beyond

Consider this bizarre, but typical, routine from the 1988 presidential campaign: Bob Dole's Iowa campaign director often sleeps in Omaha or Moline, Ill. Or this more cynical aspect: young, fresh-faced volunteers for candidates in Iowa or New Hampshire sometimes receive their living expenses off the books, being handed $20 bills in out-of-the-way motel rooms.

The cause of these contortions is one of the worst election laws on the books, the Pollyannaish effort to limit the amount a campaign can spend in each state. Enacted in 1974 under the guise of fairness, these artificial ceilings are ludicrously low for the Iowa caucuses ($770,000) and the New Hampshire primary ($460,400).

Presidential campaigns will live or die in these early tests, but the candidates are forced to spend amounts that would be inadequate to win some seats in the California state senate. Small wonder that this year, as in every campaign since 1976, contenders are vying with one another to invent the most artful ways to beat the cap. Almost all direct mail to undecided Iowa voters, for example, comes with an awkward postscript asking for contributions. The rationale: fund-raising appeals are exempt from the state spending caps.

Campaign managers know that strictly abiding by the rules is an invitation to almost certain defeat. The prevailing ethos is to skirt the limits as aggressively as one dares. In Iowa, political operatives estimate that some campaigns in both parties will spend close to $2 million each, with many of the expenditures dubiously allocated to other states or exempt under federal loopholes. Even if campaign officials get caught, says Jim Lake, press secretary for the 1984 Reagan re-election effort, "at least they won't have to say they lost because they didn't spend enough."

Cynicism is rampant because enforcement by the Federal Election Commission is belated and haphazard. Not until 1987 did Walter Mondale's campaign pay a slap-on-the-wrist fine for grossly exceeding the Iowa and New Hampshire limits in 1984. Ronald Reagan too went way over the New Hampshire cap in 1980. Even FEC Press Official Sharon Snyder concedes, "If you were to look at all the prior campaigns, you'd get the feeling that the ones who got to the conventions were those who went over the spending limits in Iowa and New Hampshire."

About the only plausible defense for the spending limits is that they buttress long-shot candidates. "It's sort of like the speed limit," says Pat Mitchell, Paul Simon's Iowa coordinator. "It keeps the carnage down." Most campaign spending experts, such as Herbert Alexander of the University of Southern California, would like to see the state caps eliminated. "They're ridiculously low," he says, "and they lead to subterfuge." All too often, in fact, the result is an amoral minuet in which the end (the White House) justifies all sorts of quasi-legal chicanery. "There is retail chiseling, like renting a car in Massachusetts and driving it to New Hampshire," explains a top Republican campaign staffer. "And then there is wholesale blowing off of the limits -- spend now and pay the fine later."