The reform debate about the political parties is getting stuck on the question of whether, or to what extent, deregulation will improve the tone and ideological cast of national politics.  Some have argued that relieving parties of this or that restriction will alleviate pressures toward polarization and perhaps promote more centrist, moderate politics, in large measure by giving party leaders more influence.  There is some evidence for this, but it is naturally being disputed in a fight between the “purists” who resists deregulation and the “pragmatists” who favor it, and neither side to this debate is likely to score a decisive victory.  So if there can be no clear outcome, there is every reason to hope that not too much is riding on one.

When one day it has more or less run its course, the scholarship will likely show the party leaders with more money at their disposal can use it for better and for worse.  In some cases they will have the will and the means to check the extremes and expand their capacity to negotiate with opponents and move productive legislation. In others, this will not be the case.  Which of these alternative scenarios comes to pass in any state, in any time, will depend on a range of factors, including differences in states and regions and their politics, differences between the parties, the complexities of what is sometimes called the "issue environment,” and other factors.  As Lee Drutman has noted, “polarization is a function of many, many things,” and campaign finance may be only one such thing.

Before all these questions is another one: the difficulty of pinning down what one means by centrist or moderate politics, or even by a civil tone (notwithstanding some contemporary, notable examples of grotesque excess).  And another question: whether the moderate position is in all circumstances the most desirable one, if the policy described as “moderate” is just a product of splitting the difference.  The policies born of getting something done just for its own sake are not always distinguished by their effectiveness.

It is a better bet – – and a bet it is – that some of the time, empowered party leadership with stronger parties behind them can better perform their jobs. Right now they compete for their political influence with candidates who can build their own fundraising bases, and with outside groups (some of which, like Super PACs and (c) organizations, can be indistinguishable from the rest of a candidate’s, well, “support network.”).  To put parties at a disadvantage in this transformed political battlefield should require sound, well-supported policy justification.  Four years now, the justification has fallen entirely on the parties’ supposed role in fomenting corruption, the result of their (once) unique intimacy with candidates.

FEC Chair Ravel is not the first former or present Commissioner to turn to Comedy Central to lampoon her own agency.  Trevor Potter, once also a Chair, came to run a major reform organization that collaborated on bits of high comedy with Stephen Colbert. He even would emerge for his performance in a shower of dollars from something called the Mazda Scandal Booth. But he was out of the agency then and Ms. Ravel is still running it, and she decided that she had had enough of the FEC’s dysfunction and would play it for laughs. One of her colleagues was not amused.

Chair Ravel defended her appearance as free speech and as the only way now, all else having failed, to make her point. The problem for the FEC in any resort to high comedy is that the audience may misunderstand the joke. It is not a far cry from laughing at the agency to laughing at the law and concluding that politicians will never make or enforce rules against their own interest. The same ridicule can and has been directed at reform proposals.

The quips at the FEC’s expense depend on clever bits of exaggeration and oversimplification that, in the best humor, expose some measure of truth. The tricky part is keeping the exaggeration under control so that it does not overwhelm the routine and strike a false note. Does the audience come away both entertained and better informed, or at risk of being misled?

Visiting Harvard Law School, Justice Kennedy answered a question about Citizens United by saying "what happens with money in politics is not good."  And he tied certain of these unfortunate effects to that case: the "result is not happy."  Frank Wilkinson of Bloomberg News wondered if the Justice was having “second thoughts” about his campaign finance jurisprudence.

The Justice did not say clearly what about the use of money in politics is not good, or in what particular respects the results of Citizens United are not happy.  Part of the problem, he said, was disclosure, which is too slow.  With faster, Internet-speed reporting, voters could decide whether a candidate receiving certain sources and amounts of money deserve their vote.  This is as far as he would explicitly go, but there were hints of other reservations that he would still have about undoing Citizens United.

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Larry Lessig’s campaign ran into a series of problems, the last and decisive one being his failure to qualify for inclusion in the debates. Earlier he had founded a Super PAC to establish that a well-funded campaign finance advocacy could swing an election. It did not work out as planned.  He also tried out unsuccessfully a referendum candidacy that featured a pledge that he would not serve a full term, only as long as necessary to effect his reform program, after which he would turn the reins over to his vice president.  He found that voters did not respond well to that message.

In each instance, much to his credit, Lessig explained openly the reversals he had suffered.  In the case of the debates, he blames the party debate inclusion criteria, but in the others, he confessed error or miscalculation.  He never doubted the cause, but has acknowledged the problems with his campaign.

Perhaps, however, the cause he champions, while an important part of a campaign, is not sufficient to carry it. The platform on which Lessig was running – – that campaign finance must be fixed "first", before anything else can be done – – may simply lack persuasive force. The fatal flaw revealed by each of his successive disappointments seems to have been just this single-mindedness. The super PAC was supposed to show that this issue alone was a winning issue; the referendum presidency he offered was to be so exclusively concerned with campaign finance, that the referendum president would resign his post as soon as he met with success on only that one policy initiative.

Tom Edsall’s piece on Congressional public financing proposals imparts a good sense of both their appeal and their vulnerabilities—the reasons why they have strong supporters and equally committed detractors.  Of all the points of disagreement, perhaps the simplest is the use of public money: either you believe that political reform, like any other, requires funding, or you will protest that the use of taxpayer dollars is nothing more than “welfare for politicians.”  Should the argument move from there, the competing claims about costs and benefits are notoriously hard to test, and what passes for an acceptable case depends on profound differences in political perspective.

These are the principal claims:

--less corruption: that dependence on private funding can lead to quid pro quo corruption;

--better public policy: that candidates who spent too much time fundraising develop a skewed view of public and policy    priorities--and there can be a related objective, highlighted by Edsall, that public financing schemes will result in better progressive policy, such as a higher minimum wage, stronger gun controls and the abolition of the death penalty;

--better electoral process: that ordinary citizens without wealth or high-level connections would have more of a chance to run      for office, offering more choice in candidate backgrounds, worldviews and platforms;

--better government: that candidates would spend less time on fundraising and more at their jobs;

--more political equality: that the political system would benefit overall from a more “level playing field.”