Jay Ambrose: Regulating free speech

After all, it's not Howard Dean's idea to finish a 30-second TV commercial by saying, "I'm Howard Dean, and I approve this message." We figured he had approved the message because he is the one who just gave it. Whatever you think of his politics, Dean would not say something so redundantly foolish of his own volition. He is forced into doing it, and the instrument doing the forcing is one of the great legislative travesties of our time, the campaign finance law of 2002.

This so-called reform measure limits what advocacy groups can say on TV and radio ads as elections draw close, restricts donations to political parties and otherwise strangles the First Amendment by wrapping 495 pages of rules around any possibility of its being a living, breathing thing. One of those rules is this silly, obnoxious requirement that candidates must face the camera in TV ads paid for by their campaigns and announce their accountability for the content.

The purpose of this provision is to make ads less brutal to the opponent, according to news reports. If Candidate A has to fess up for all to see that he said OK to this commercial that just called Candidate B a hatchet-carrying escapee from an institution for the criminally insane, it's figured that Candidate A won't authorize commercials about hatchets and institutions for the criminally insane. Instead, he will talk about health insurance or some such, maybe emphasizing his own superior qualities, and working in fewer than the usual number of lies about Candidate B.

Call this what you like, but don't call it democracy. It is not a system in which truly free men and women contend for office by seeking the votes of a public trusted to be discerning about charlatans. The thing that strikes you over and over again about reformers is that while they claim to believe in the great wisdom of the American people, they really don't. The reformers think they themselves are plenty discerning but that the rest of us are boobs who will walk off cliffs if they do not tether us with regulations they thought up through their keener intellects.

It is true that majorities can sometimes be tyrannical, as exhibited in the now-banished Jim Crow laws in the South, for instance. Such is a chief reason that we have a Bill of Rights, for which the campaign reformers also have scant regard. The right of free speech is perhaps the most important of these rights. What the First Amendment aims at centrally is permitting the widest possible latitude to political discussion. Even legitimately elected legislative bodies cannot tell you what you can say, and the truth therefore has a better chance of emerging than it would have. The democracy is enriched by the thoughts of many, and the conscience of the individual is given its day.

I think full disclosure of who contributed money and how much is check enough in campaigns. I do think the public ought to know who paid for political commercials through easily accessed public records. I am not against all the "attack" ads, however. They can be a means through which the public learns about the questionable character or doings of candidates. If they are lies, the person lied about can make that clear. And the public can decide if they are maliciously irrelevant. The public might then figure the maker of the ads is the one who ought to pay on Election Day.

The Democratic presidential candidates who are now telling us on TV that they approve of what they just said include members of Congress who voted for the campaign finance law, and who should have known better, just as President Bush should have known better than to sign it after he spoke out against it. The campaign managers of some of them are fussing now, according to a published account, mostly because the required sentence makes the candidates appear goofy. It's also an affront to their rights as American citizens.

I am not covered by this law, by the way, but I do want you to know that I am Jay Ambrose, and I approve of the above message.