_Search The Pilot * _ Democracy's Defenders Draw Big Crowds ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Steve Ford _ If North Carolina goes on to become the next state (not the first, but the next) to grab the horns of the money-in-politics bull, then it’s likely we’ll be able to look back at the week just passed as a milestone of sorts. It was the week Bill Moyers came to town. ll right, I hear the snickers. What difference, pray tell, is one wonkish TV blabbermouth who’s been nagging us about the various errors of our ways all these years likely to make when it comes to overhauling a campaign system that suits an entire constellation of special interests and their political co-dependents to a tee? No telling at this point. But keep this in mind: As Moyers made his rounds in the Triangle, he had company. Lots of company. oyers, as it happens, was simply the star attraction in a big-time campaign reform push. One outfit engaged in the pushing is affiliated with a true North Carolina public-interest heavyweight — the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. The outfit is called the N.C. Center for Voter Education, and its chairman is the renowned liberal firebrand Bob Morgan (that’s a joke, pal). Ex-United States senator, ex-state attorney general, ex-director of the SBI, the venerable Mr. Morgan is not the kind of wild-eyed zealot to charge off into the swamps in pursuit of some reformist will-o-the-wisp. He may charge off into the swamps, true, but he’ll probably have a good reason and be chasing something he thinks he can catch. So it is with public financing of election campaigns. Morgan helped warm up the luncheon crowd that gathered Wednesday at the Sheraton in downtown Raleigh for a program sponsored by the Reynolds Foundation and the center that he heads; Moyers had top billing. And what a crowd it was: at least 200 invited Tar Heel movers and shakers, with luminaries ranging from Chief Justice Henry Frye to Cary Mayor Glen Lang. Plus honchos from national organizations advocating campaign reform like Common Cause and Public Campaign. After Morgan ran his rhetorical lap in impressive fashion, he handed off to another un-radical, a boardroom type named Charles Kolb, who heads an old-line national business group called the Committee for Economic Development. This is the group, you may recall, that came out for a ban on unregulated “soft money” campaign contributions a few months ago after some of its members — executives of blue-chip companies — decided they were tired of being shaken down. Whereupon, U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, arch foe of campaign reform on Capitol Hill, sent notes to the renegades threatening to have them fitted with concrete footgear or something like that — or even worse, to give `em a legislative wet Willie. Kolb ventured that within five years, the current campaign finance system, with all its potential for abuse, will have been recognized as “the functional equivalent of the Berlin Wall.” Kaput, that is. Next in the exhortation parade was that most conspicuous recent convert to the cause, none other than Gov. Hunt. And when Jim Hunt says our democracy is no longer as healthy as it ought to be, that counts. “Candidates for office are forced by the present system to become full-time fund-raisers,” he said. “That is a fact. I speak from experience.” Having raised and spent in the neighborhood of $35 million to $40 million during his various campaigns, he’s not kidding about the experience. And as he told the gathering, he now favors publicly financed campaigns for major statewide offices. “If we don’t do that we risk losing a fundamental principle,” Hunt said. “The arms race in our campaigns threatens the principle of one man, one vote. And if we lose that, we lose it all.” Now, the fact is that North Carolina’s advocates for “clean elections” envision public campaign financing not just for “major statewide offices” but for legislative seats as well. That’s the rub, since the General Assembly would have to overcome a long-standing disdain for the notion. Yet it’s no longer so terribly far-fetched to think that our legislators eventually could decide to take the plunge, putting us in the same reformers swim as Maine, Massachusetts, Arizona and Vermont. A bill to do just that has been gradually gaining support. And nobody who listened to Bill Moyers impassioned call the other day would lightly dismiss its prospects.Moyers is a familiar figure from his work on CBS and public television, for his thoughtful writings — and to people of a certain age, even from his stint as Lyndon Johnson’s presidential press secretary. To hear him hold forth, though, is to be reminded that he could have been a heck of a preacher: He holds a master’s degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. If there had been any fire and brimstone in the vicinity of Raleigh’s Fayetteville Street Mall, Moyers would have summoned it. “I believe that people who have lots of money should be able to buy all the houses they want, buy all the cars they want, buy all the gizmos they want — but they should not be able to buy all the democracy they want,” he proclaimed, conceding no oratorical style points to Billy Graham. It was a devilishly tough act to follow for former Chief Justice Jim Exum, who argued that the high cost of running for office makes North Carolina’s campaign system flat-out unconstitutional because wealth has become a requirement to participate. The night before, a Moyers appearance in Chapel Hill (he spoke on “Money, Politics and the Soul of Democracy”) had drawn a throng of 600 — so many that the fire marshal had to turn people away. If fixing our campaign system is a topic that used to make eyes glaze over, it’s now making plenty of them sparkle. Steve Ford is associate editor of The News &Observer of Raleigh, from which this column is reprinted.