Over at Total Buzz, Martin Wisckol gives a good basic overview of the OC campaign "reform" ordinance being advanced by Shirley Grindle in conjunction with Sup. John Moorlach's office.

There are some additional elements to the TINCUP 2 proposal that bear further scrutiny, and scrutiny they shall receive on this blog between now and the February 5 Board meeting. Hopefully a majority of the Board will realize this plan should be filed away under "Really Bad Ideas."


Embedded within the Grindle/Moorlach plan is the notion that contribution limits somehow "clean up" politics and balance the playing field -- notwithstanding that America's more than three decade experiment with contribution limits has failed to show limits to anything of the kind.

I had a brief discussion Moorlach Chief of Staff Mario Mainero, who has been writing this ordinance with Grindle, on the topic of whether contribution limits disadvantage non-incumbents. Mario believes that limits hurt incumbents more than they do challengers, and that a lack of limits helps incumbents more than challengers.

Mario is a man of integrity and I have great respect for his intellect, but I think he is plain wrong on this count. I have been involved in politics for going on 20 years, and have seen little evidence that contribution limits do anything but enhance the already considerable advantages of incumbency.

We need look no farther than Sheriff Mike Carona campaign for a third term in 2006. What was the single most important factor preventing Carona's opponents from forcing him into a run-off election that he would probably have lost?

Contribution limits.

There are about 1.5 million registered voters in Orange County, and communicating with them  is a hugely expensive proposition for anyone running for a county-wide office such as Sheriff. Even if you targeted very high propensity voters, you're talking about several hundred thousand people -- still a very expensive proposition.

Sheriff Carona, by dint of having been the incumbent for eight years, had the ability to raise an enormous sum of money -- enough to ensure he'd be able to pay for several county-wide mailers.

His main challengers, Bill Hunt and Ralph Martin, simply could not match Carona in fund-raising. Martin couldn't even afford a single county-wide mailer. I think Hunt may have managed one piece, but otherwise the only voter contact he had was via the independent expenditures from the deputies union.

In the end, Carona won a bare 50% and avoided a November run-off by the slimmest of margins.

If Hunt or Martin had been able to corral one, two or a handful of wealthy supporters to pony up five-figure contributions for mailers attacking Carona and promoting themselves as alternatives, the Sheriff would have been forced into a run-off and his coalition of the unwilling would likely have imploded as a result.

Granted, the same absence of limits would have enabled Carona to raise even more vast sums, but that's not the point. Hunt and Martin didn't need to out-raise Carona. They only needed to raise enough to communicate their message to voters and remind them of the various allegations swirling around the Sheriff -- and Grindle's TIN CUP closed off the possibility of them from doing so.

The irony, is Mike Carona was able to win a third term largely thanks to Shirley Grindle. And the double irony is he was forced into retirement by Shirley Grindle.

But the underlying lesson is that while Shirley Grindle may hector county elected officials, her campaign finance rules function as the bodyguard of their re-elections.