Thursday, June 01, 2000
Sierra Club takes to airwaves with attack on Bush
TV ads called 'ultimate loophole' in election laws
By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Sierra Club says the 30-second TV spot Cincinnatians began seeing on local news broadcasts Wednesday — the one hammering at George W. Bush's environmental record in Texas — is purely educational.
“Purely political” more accurately describes it, according to critics of a campaign finance system that allows special interest groups — liberal and conservative — to spend millions in “soft money” on “issue” ads.
The 30-second commercial features a bass angler from rural Texas and a suburban Houston housewife criticizing the Texas governor and presumptive GOP presidential nominee for allowing the state's air and water pollution problems to fester.
At the end of the ad, it does not tell viewers to vote for someone other than Mr. Bush for president. Instead, it asks viewers to call the governor's office in Texas and tell him to oppose federal legislation environmentalists say would weaken clean air and water standards.
But the ad — part of an $8 million Sierra Club ad campaign — is not running in Texas, where viewers might have a direct interest in the ad's scenes of belching smokestacks and children on respirators.
Instead, it is running in Southwestern Ohio, Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin.
What those places have in common is that they all are considered crucial swing states in the 2000 presidential election.
“Ads like this are about electing and defeating candidates, not about education,” said Larry Makinson, director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., group that tracks campaign money.
A loophole in the U.S. Tax Code — Section 527 — allows the Sierra Club and a host of other special interest groups from one end of the political spectrum to the other to set up tax-exempt political committees that can run “issue” ads like the one running now in Cincinnati and not have to report the sources of the money.
Mr. Makinson called Section 527 “the ultimate loophole.”
As long as the independent groups do not use terms like “vote for,” “defeat” or “elect,” and they do not coordinate directly with a candidate's campaign organization, federal election law allows them unlimited and unreported spending on “issue” ad campaigns.
“Welcome to election 2000,” Mr. Makinson said. “That's the way it is going to be this year. These kinds of ads will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Allen Mattison, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, said the century-old environmental group is not like many other “soft money” groups running ad campaigns around the country “because people know who we are and what we stand for.”
“We support campaign finance reform, but while the law is something else, we're going to do what the system allows,” Mr. Mattison said.
Perhaps one reason why the Bush campaign has not howled too loudly about the Sierra Club ad campaign is Mr. Bush benefited from a similar campaign this year in the New Hampshire GOP primary.
A group calling itself Republicans for Clean Air spent $2.5 million on ads attacking Mr. Bush's rival, U.S. Sen. John McCain, on his environmental voting record.
At first, no one could figure out who or what “Republicans for Clean Air” was. It turned out to be two Texas financiers who were major Bush fund-raisers.
Spending by “527” committees already has become a factor in the hotly-contested U.S. Senate race in Michigan. There, a pro-business group is running an ad attacking Democratic challenger Deborah Stabenow, who is taking on incumbent Republican Spencer Abraham.
“All the worst abuses you heard or read about in the '96 campaign are being done legally now because these groups have discovered "527,'” Mr. Makinson said.
In the ad running now on Cincinnati TV, the Sierra Club points out Texas leads the nation in the number of facilities that violate clean water standards and that Texas, with 110 million pounds of toxic pollutants relased into the atmosphere, leads the nation in air pollution.
Glen Brand, the Cincinnati-based conservation organizer for the Sierra Club, said the ads are running in Ohio, Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin “because Gov. Bush is listening to people in those states right now. The problem has been he hasn't been listening to people in Texas.”
This week, Bush campaign spokesman Dan Bartlett responded to attacks by presumptive Democratic nominee Al Gore and groups such as the Sierra Club by saying they have tried to “pollute” the Texas governor's record of progress on environmental issues.
On Mr. Bush's watch, Mr. Bartlett said, Texas has reduced industrial pollution by 11 percent and is first in the nation in reducing toxics.
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