Unlike some candidates who are attempting wholesale rewrites of their pasts, Thompson has been completely upfront in admitting his part in the legislation and has said that he is proud of parts of it, but that some parts of it were a mistake. And he has been clear on which parts are which. He hasn’t tried to lie and obfuscate, he has come right out and said he thought at the time that getting soft money out of politics was worth the rest of the bill, but in retrospect it was a mistake.
From Human Events:
“Yes,” replied the former Tennessee senator without hesitation. “You will recall that the central part of the legislation was getting rid of soft money [from the political process].” He then went on to remind me that he came from a background in the private sector and, in that sector, it would have been thought unseemly for “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to be poured in to influence someone’s decision. In the public arena, “it got to be the norm” because of the soft money, upon which there were no limits for donations to the two major political parties.” The contributors, he said, would then, “harass legislators before they vote on anything. This was not a good idea.”
Thompson went on to remind me that it was his amendment to McCain-Feingold that, “raised the hard money index” and he was also proud of that.
If there is anything in McCain-Feingold that “has not worked out,” he went to say, it is “placing limitations on ads [by independent groups] in the [political] process. Thompson hinted that he would support legislation to change this, since “the Supreme Court has better things to do with its time than hear cases on unfair limitation.” (Earlier this year, by a decision of 5-to-4, the Supreme Court struck down parts of McCain-Feingold that dealt with limiting ads by independent groups.) He also said that the landmark campaign finance legislation he held shepherd to passage (and which President Bush signed in ‘01) has created a larger bureaucracy to enforce regulations and “that part hasn’t worked out.”
Thank you for your reply. I still need to understand this better, but you appear to have expressed well his view on this.