March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

While the bedazzling costs of Ross Perot’s presidential campaign — $3 million a day toward the end — have garnered national attention, campaigns in Maine have quietly hit records as well. Were the state’s economy as robust as the spending habits of some candidates, there would be no recession here at all.

Chuck Cianchette, running for the Senate seat in District 9, set the tone for the year when he spent $90,000 in the Democratic primary. His opponent, Ave Maria Dover, countered with a $37,000 campaign in the primary and topped $44,000 in her run as an independent. Mr. Cianchette, meanwhile, has spent a total of more than $130,000 to gain a job that pays about $9,000 a year.

District 9 isn’t the only place where money has flowed more freely than usual. Senate President Charles Pray spent about $75,000, some of it to help fellow Democrats, but much going to his tough fight against challenger Stephen Hall of Guilford. And it was Sen. Pray who announced the banding together of Republican business people to raise about $150,000 to help the GOP in tight races.

The higher stakes in Maine politics risk excluding potential candidates who can’t match the advertising dollars of an opponent or of making cash-poor candidates beholden to the special interests that finance campaigns. The effect of these is to make the public cynical about elections in general and politicians in particular.

According to a report by the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund and the Maine People’s Resource Center, the cost of running for the state Senate has risen from $5,560 in 1984 to $15,516 in 1990. That 358 percent increase is certain to be raised when the numbers for 1992 are tabulated. What is more worrisome in the report, however, are the sources of campaign funds.

More than ever, big business, with banking, insurance and real estate interests heading the list, are the prime contributors to candidates’ coffers. Of the $614,617 spent on candidates that were studied in the Maine report, only two-tenths of 1 percent of the donations came from individual registered voters in Maine.

All of this makes campaign-finance reform inevitable. The reform will make campaigning and keeping track of candidates more complicated, but the alternative is worse. And when politicians yell about the extra paperwork the reforms require, they should remember that they brought the problem on themselves.


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