CAMPAIGN FINANCE

NEW YORK — When former Republican Party chair Haley Barbour testified before the Senate investigative committee recently, his performance won rave reviews. The New York Times gushed in a news analysis, Barbour’s “throaty Mississippi drawl instantly suffus[ed] the Senate hearing room with the air of a master player of big-money campaigning, an ardent pro who knows when he is being challenged to watch his back.”

Like the Times, most news outlets covered Barbour’s appearance as the hearings’ first example of high drama rather than focusing on the complicated questions involved in Barbour’s testimony. For this reason, Barbour was at least partially successful in deflecting attention from a series of contentions regarding his own foreign funding schemes--though the substance of his testimony, and that presented a day later, confirmed virtually every allegation the Democrats had leveled against him.

Barbour, as the news reports emphasized, is a man who knows his job. He realizes that much of the media, particularly the broadcast and cable news networks, view themselves to be no less entertainment vehicles than information sources. The parts of his testimony that would be likely to show up on news feeds therefore were sound-bites that created a sense of drama, rather than those that answered the questions raised.

At issue was whether Barbour, when party chair, used a Republican policy organization called the “National Policy Forum” to funnel foreign money into 1994 congressional races. Had the money been contributed directly, then Barbour and the RNC would have violated exactly the same laws for which the Committee is investigating the Democrats.

The key dispute involves a $2.1 million loan guarantee that Barbour solicited in 1994 from Ambrous Tung Young, a Taiwanese citizen, on a yacht in Hong Kong. Barbour maintains he was unaware that the funds were foreign in origin, but the loan was entirely above-board in any case, because the National Policy Forum and the GOP were unrelated entities. The loan in question, however, did go directly from the forum into the party’s coffers, where it helped to elect 1994’s freshman GOP class. Later on, the forum went bankrupt, the RNC refused to honor the debt and Young lost most of his money.

As a spectator, one is tempted to admire the brazenness of Barbour’s defense in the face of so much contrary evidence. While he insisted the only tie between the forum and the party was that of debtor to creditor, Barbour ran both organizations simultaneously. He signed a fund-raising letter telling donors the forum was being established by the Republican National Committee “as an issue development subsidiary.” In 1994, Michael Baroody, then the forum’s president, told Barbour he was quitting because it had become “increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction of separation” between the forum and the GOP. Baroody warned Barbour that the blurring of the two was jeopardizing the forum’s tax-exempt status. Indeed, the IRS later denied it that status.

On the issue of the foreign origins of the money, Barbour was also warned in advance by Baroody, John-Deanlike, that, “We could get the money, all right; that would be easy. But it would be wrong.” Young, in a deposition, explained he had told Barbour the money for the loan guarantee came from his corporation in Hong Kong. Another GOP fund-raiser also testified he told Barbour the loan guarantee was from Hong Kong.

Barbour had answers to all this, but they were so lame they barely merit repetition. The fund-raising letter he sent out was a “screw up” by his nephew. Barbour could not understand the foreign money warnings because they were given in a Chinese accent. The IRS denial was part of a White House conspiracy.

Few of these responses made it onto the evening news or into newspaper leads. That would have defeated their purpose. Barbour’s testimony was not designed to answer the charges, but to counter them with a staged performance that would replace them on the evening news. In that regard, he was successful. On the day of his testimony, 130 journalists crowded into the standing-room-only hearings, graced for the first time by CNN’s live cameras. Every senator sat conscientiously on the dais. A day later, when the testimony that demonstrated Barbour’s dissimulation was presented, everything was back to normal. Barely 20 journalists bothered to hang around. It being Friday, many of the senators were back home. If the news led the next morning’s papers, it would do so on a Saturday--where it could die from lack of interest.

This spectacle of bait-and-switch congressional testimony is no less depressing for its familiarity. Oliver L. North and Elliott Abrams deliberately misled congressional inquiries, but because they provided such great theater, nobody seemed to mind terribly much. When Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh published his authoritative account of the lies and ensuing cover-up that the Reagan administration had successfully perpetrated on Congress and the country, the reaction to the book sounded like children bored by an endless movie. “Is this guy still angry about that old story?” journalists seemed to be asking. Doesn’t he know North’s a talk-show host and a conservative folk hero, and Abrams (along with Caspar W. Weinberger) was pardoned for his lies by George Bush.

America lost its collective innocence about truth-telling in government during Watergate and Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson promised during the 1964 election campaign, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” when he was planning to do just that. Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger lied about not only Vietnam and Cambodia, but also their efforts to protect those lies. Going back even further, President Franklin D. Roosevelt misled the country about his efforts to involve America in World War II. President Dwight D. Eisenhower lied when he denied the Soviets’ contention that they had shot down a U.S. spy plane over their territory. President John F. Kennedy lied about the solution to the Cuban missile crisis.

Clearly our political system has become inured to lying. The media can barely bring itself to pay attention. The public is certainly less than exorcised about it as well. The politicians exploit this. As former Reagan advisor Pete Teeley once observed, “You can say anything you want during a debate and 80 million people hear it.” If the press then points out an error, “So what? Maybe 200 people read it, or 2,000, or 20,000.”

Teeley is right. The Clinton administration’s explanations for its fund-raising practices are hardly more credible than Barbour’s and yet the president’s approval ratings remain sky-high. We have become too savvy to expect our politicians to tell us the truth. When Barbour insists for the cameras that “People who say everybody does it are wrong. It’s not true. Everybody doesn’t do it,” he knows he’s performing, and so do we. So there is no sense in getting all huffy about it.

But, of course, something crucial to democracy is being lost. “Truthfulness’ wrote Ralph B. Perry, in “The Moral Economy,” “is a condition of any collective undertaking.” Americans have given up on politics because they know better than to believe their representatives when it comes to honest assessments of their own practices--particularly when it comes to money. Everybody does do it. And they get away with it, because the rest of us are convinced that reform is a hopeless cause.

Our political system has become a perpetual motion machine fueled by money and lies. Ross Perot received a tremendous response with this argument in 1992 until he proved himself too unbalanced to carry it forward. What the country needs is a politician with enough courage and credibility to take on the system without making his own ego the issue. Central Casting calling Sen. Fred Thompson, former Sen. Bill Bradley, Colin L. Powell, Sen. Paul Wellstone, ex-Gov. William F. Weld. Someone!