Stem cell initiative financiers meet little scrutiny

By: JIM TRAGESER - Staff Writer | Thursday, September 23, 2004 11:18 PM PDT ∞

The ability of large amounts of money to sway elections is, if one is to believe the media, nothing short of proven fact (although failed Senate candidate and millionaire Michael Huffington might have some thoughts on that assumption).

"Campaign finance reform," we're told, is the only way to rescue our elections from the corrupting influence of big business, labor unions, builders and environmentalists, pro-choice and pro-life groups, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org, the NRA and Handgun Control Inc.

And the Supreme Court has upheld as constitutional recent laws that limit how such grass-roots organizations may spend their money in the weeks leading up to an election. One wonders what Thomas Jefferson would think of a First Amendment that doesn't let citizens band together to make political arguments on the eve of an election.

But for now, it's clear that special interests must no longer be allowed to simply buy their way into our television sets and mailboxes trying to sway our votes.

Except, it would seem, when rich industrialists are bankrolling Proposition 71, the state initiative to provide a massive grant of billions of dollars in tax money to underwrite embryonic stem cell research.

With Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, eBay founder Omar Omidyar and the entire biotech industry pouring more than $12 million and counting into the campaign to convince voters to support Prop. 71, you'd think the campaign finance "reform" folks would be having a field day. The initiative is a poster child for the supposedly corrosive effects of big money on an election. Opponents of the measure have raised less than one-tenth of the money that supporters have.

But there's no outrage, at least not the kind of well-orchestrated, visible outrage we see over other well-heeled campaigns. While the campaign finance reform movement is busy trying to dictate how various nonprofit organizations can spend their money during election season, a 10:1 fund-raising disparity gets not a squeak of protest.

It's a curious situation, and one that defies easy explanation.

The likely answer is that most folks who support campaign finance "reform" consider themselves progressive, and most folks who consider themselves progressive support embryonic stem cell research, if polls are to be believed.

And so we have a situation in which an aggressive campaign is drawing on millions of dollars from sources, in the case of California biotech companies, likely to see direct financial benefit from passage of a ballot measure ---- and the very folks who should be squawking loudest are oddly silent.

It's a silence that reflects on the inherent problems with allowing the government to regulate money spent on elections: Who gets to decide what is or isn't acceptable political speech?

For if even the most vociferous supporters of campaign finance regulation are willing to turn a blind eye to millions of dollars supporting a cause they believe in, how can any system meant to control political speech during our election cycle ever truly be fair?

Jim Trageser is the assistant online editor. E-mail him at jtrageser@nctimes.com.