MISSOURI WATCH: CAMPAIGNS + CASH = CORRUPTION

It was late September 1864 when the New York City campaign manager wrote his candidate the following message: "Every ward -- here in Manhattan and in Brooklyn -- and every election district is abundantly supplied with 'material aid.'"

The candidate, seeking re-election to a second term, was the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who had seen to it that his New York manager had several thousand dollars in "material aid," -- cold cash -- to prevail on election day. Lincoln-for-president forces expended such a vast amount of money -- at least for that time -- that newspapers all over the nation were editorializing against the president's forces "paying out money like water" to influence the election.

It is now 134 years later, and despite several valiant attempts, America is no closer to the purification of its major elections than when Honest Abe was around, who, incidentally, was not the founding father of campaign-cash corruption. As a matter of fact, when the father of our country, George Washington, first ran for a seat in Virginia's House of Burgesses before the Revolutionary War, he expended a great deal of money for all manner of goodies for voters. Expenditures for each of his four campaigns for the colonial legislature exceeded many times the going price for a house or a plot of land.

Despite all efforts to the contrary, it appears to be impossible to remove all influence of money in politics. Running for elected office costs money, and it must somehow be raised. As former U.S. senator Russell Long, the son of the infamous Huey, observed more than a quarter of a century ago, "The distinction between a large campaign contribution and a bribe is almost a hairline's difference."

No state, including our own, is immune from a candidate's search for big money from generous contributors. The two expected candidates for the U.S. Senate seat have rightly concluded that they cannot wage an effective campaign without several millions of dollars, while many of the candidates for Missouri's nine congressional seats are spending their summer of 1998 telephoning potential donors. As one candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives said the other day, "It's nothing less than humiliating and embarrassing to spend time on nothing but begging for money. I hate it, but everyone says it's the only way."

Not only must voters tolerate, if not fully accept, the reality of huge campaign expenditures, they must also learn to accept another fact of political life: the distinction noted by Russell Long between a large contribution and a bribe, and assess the difference between what can be called "honest graft" and "illegal graft." This distinction was first raised by a Tammany Hall politician at the turn of the century while opposing the argument that politics can be cleansed of money and that campaign transgressions are merely occasional aberrations.

Today voters are forced to make a distinction between a contribution that requires a special favor, such as the current charge that President Bill Clinton altered national policy toward China in exchange for major gifts from Chinese nationalists ("illegal graft") and presumably innocent contributions from individuals, organizations and corporations that seek a goal which they label good government ("legal graft").

In the early days of our republic, national politics was understandably primitive and relatively cheap. The first political parties were crude organizations lacking legitimacy; local and state ties were firmer than national allegiances, and U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures, not the general electorate. By the mid-1800s, the parties were spending more than $300,000 on presidential campaigns in addition to sums spent by state and local partisan groups, and it was at this moment these organizations began to cloud considerations of character with policy differences. It didn't take long for party loyalty to supplant the public good, a tradition extended to this very day in every precinct and district in America. Voters have been trained to support their chosen political faith, oftentimes as the only realistic measure of candidates' worth.

Today's huge, multimillion-dollar political campaigns had their inception when the major parties began seeking ways to spread their doctrines, all in the name of democracy, but the end result -- sometimes called unexpected consequences -- was the need to raise even more money to support not only a single campaign but efforts across a nation to triumph over the opposition. Even the reform once embraced as a slush fund cure-all, the direct primary, has added to the seemingly unending search for campaign donations. As one prominent proponent of campaign reform in Missouri observed during attempts to hammer together a suitable law for state candidates, "Even if we could find a solution to the general election campaigns, we're even more divided on answers for primaries." If you consider these add-ons, and then throw in the escalating television costs which must be paid if a candidate has any chance of being recognized by voters, it isn't difficult to understand why this year's campaigns for a seat in the U.S. Senate will exceed $10 million.

Most readers are probably not old enough to remember when Missouri's presidential candidate in 1948 ran out of money and his campaign train was stranded in Oklahoma. Harry Truman's victory at the polls that November surprised a lot of Americans who had placed their money on his opponent. At least HST spared us the embarrassment of calling for campaign reform after he was elected, a spectacle perpetrated by the incumbent president.

A New York Times/CBS poll recently found that 90 percent of Americans want finance reform, but 78 percent doubt it will work, which suggests we can resolve this problem only by recognizing that electoral power must be transferred from people willing to spend money to voters willing to exercise the power they were given more than two centuries ago.

Jack Stapleton of Kennett is editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.