The money fix.

• Author: Brown, Jerry
• Position: Campaign finance reform

The Democrats' plan to clean up campaigns wont' make politicians kick the Big Dollar habit. I know; I was addicted once myself

Last May, President Clinton unveiled his plan to change corrupt campaign practices. The president calls his proposal the "most comprehensive reform of the political system in the history of this country." I call this a scam. If every line of the President's legislation were adopted tomorrow, the same corruption in Washington would continue - at conveniently reduced prices. The checks that buy the votes would still be signed by those who sign them now. Corporate executives and the wealthy would still call the tune.

I grew up in politics. My father rose from San Francisco district attorney to state attorney general to governor of California. He beat Richard Nixon, lost to Ronald Reagan, and missed just one Democratic National Convention in 50 years. I have been present at hundreds and hundreds of fundraising events. Maybe thousands. I have lost count, but I know I have raised roughly $20 million since the early seventies.

Contributions of $10,000 and even $100,000 are not unfamiliar to me. I have spent days on end cajoling all manner of rich and powerful people out of money to mount multimillion dollar campaigns for the U.S. Senate, the California governorship, and the presidency. More recently, as chairman of the Democratic Party of California, I collected more millions. In 1989, for example, I organized a dinner honoring Mario Cuomo at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles and raised $750,000. In 1990, I put on another dinner with Lloyd Bentsen at the Fairmount Hotel in San Francisco and collected $550,000. I know what I am talking about. This is about corruption, not a mere "money chase."

I know that our entire campaign system rests on the twin pillars of $1,000 donations, bundled and multiplied 10, 20 or even 100 times, and the massively repetitive TV ads and expensive mailings these $1,000 donations buy. House Speaker Thomas Foley recently said that it is a "tremendous distortion of reality" to say that Congress is getting corrupt. That depends on what you call corruption.

The corruption I speak of is not legally defined as a felony - at least not yet - but rather is the current method of paying for American elections. You take money from the richest and best connected 1 percent to get elected and then pretend that this does not affect your judgment.

Jess Unruh, the famous speaker of the California State Assembly in the sixties, coined the phrase, "money is the mother's milk of politics." He said that you had no business in politics unless "you could take their money, eat their food, drink their booze, f - their women and then vote against them." That's what I call either naive or skillfully self-deceptive.

As you might expect, Speaker Foley also depends political action...