Gov. Rendell stopped by the Editorial Board today, bringing along Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, a fellow Democrat.
Their main purpose was to pitch Napolitano's ideas on how state governments can breed technological innovation, which will be the signature theme of her one-year tenure as head of the National Governors Association.
We asked Napolitano, who is a very impressive person, how she liked her state's "clean election" system, which provides public funds to those who abide by campaign donation limits, and allows them to get more public funds (up to a point) when their free-spending opponents opt out of the system or self-fund.
She liked the system fine, she said, having won two gubernatorial elections under it. But she allowed as how the paperwork could get nit-picky and the tendency of candidates to file specious claims of violation against one another got tedious.
That got us talking about the self-funded candidate, millionaire Tom Knox, who's making such a perplexing, unmerited splash in the Philly mayoral campaign.
And that got Rendell explaining to his colleague from the Southwest how Pennsylvania campaign finance works. She may be from the Southwest, but in this realm Pennsylvania is the true Wild West. No rules, not right.
"Wait," she asked, jaw scraping the floor, "you have no state limits at all?"
Nope.
Then we told her that, before Philadelphia enacted its own donation limits, several mayoral campaigns had cost upwards of $20 million.
Her jaw now seemed permanently affixed to the lovely green(ish) carpet of our beloved Fishbowl, the board meeting room.
Then Rendell pitched his idea of enacting $5,000 donation limits, saying the changes wrought in Harrisburg by the pay-raise revolt made this idea politically plausible for the first time in a long time. The two governors agreed that limits any lower would not fit the realities of what it costs to buy TV time in Pennsylvania - and would end up giving a huge advantage to pols with high name recognitions and millionaires willing to spend their millions on getting elected.
There is a Nixon-to-China, ironic quality to Ed Rendell - one of the all-time all-stars at Hoovering up campaign donations - proposing campaign finance limits. Easy for him to do, some scoff, now that he's term limited and not running for anything.
But motive matters less here than seizing the opportunity for reform that he rightly sees as opening up. Based on what we've heard at public forums and through email, the citizens of this city and state are far more ready to see radical changes in how campaigns are financed than are the self-interested players of the game. But the pols are in a listening mood, thanks to the pay-raise rebellion.
Let's take advantage of it.
- Chris Satullo
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