More background on the governor’s problem with public service announcements
April 8th, 2008 by Montana HeadlinesJack over at Western Word has already touched on the governor’s public service announcement problem, giving a nice summary of the complaint that the Montana GOP has filed with the Commissioner of Political Practices.
It is useful to recall some of the background on why the law against political candidates making public service announcements (PSA’s) came to be in the first place. The bill was carried by Sen. Joe Tropila, D-Great Falls, who had this to say at the time:
In nearly 20 years of door-to-door campaigning for office, Sen. Joe Tropila, D-Great Falls, said the biggest complaint he hears from voters is “Why are these people running for public office running public service announcements with our money?”
His Senate Bill 16 would prohibit a state official who has filed for office from spending any state money for advertisements and public service announcements in newspapers and on radio and television that contain the candidate’s name, photograph or voice. The exception would be in the case of a national or state emergency, but then only if the announcement is “reasonably necessary to the candidate’s official functions.”
So, the questions are as follows:
1. Was public money spent in any way in making these radio ads featuring the governor’s voice? The GOP brief makes the case that public money was spent, on a number of levels.
2. And as a corollary, if no state money was spent as the governor claims, then whose money was spent making and distributing the ads? Someone had to pay for them. The radio stations presumably donated the airtime — if they weren’t public service announcements, then what exactly were they?
3. Were these announcements the result of a state emergency, thus falling under the exception clause? Maybe the governor’s internal polling isn’t looking as good as it had been – that’s an emergency, from his perspective, perhaps.
Seriously, though, it seems as though this is probably the result of carelessness on the governor’s part, or on the part of one of his state employees. It probably didn’t even cross anyone’s mind that the governor couldn’t just do what he wanted to — which is a problem in and of itself. In an election year, especially given that this is a Democratic Party that now claims to be more ethical and transparent than everyone else, one would hope that elected officials would be looking at their every action, scrutinizing them to see if they could be perceived as following the rules strictly.
And that makes it concerning because the governor could have just said, “you know, you’re right, we weren’t thinking — we were just trying to help out with promoting Ag Month.” He could have paid the fine, if any, and gone on. Instead, we are told that no public money was spent on the ads. This doesn’t make sense, since either the governor was acting in his capacity as governor, or he was acting in his capacity as a candidate. If the former, he is breaking the law — if the latter, he broke the law by not identifying it as a campaign ad.
A final note — it needs to be said that what brought this issue to a head in 2004 was the fact that Pat Davison accused then Sec. State Bob Brown of abusing PSA’s during their primary campaign. (The irony of Davison, now in federal prison on massive fraud charges, accusing Brown of unethical behavior is not lost on us.) So while a Democrat carried the bill and a Democratic governor signed it, it was also a Republican issue, and the bill passed pretty much unanimously.
All the more reason that the governor, of all people, should be paying strict attention to this law — until now, it could be said that this was a “Bob Brown issue” from the last campaign. Now, the governor has implicated himself in the practice — and unlike it was when Brown was doing PSA’s, it is now illegal.
_____________________
Addendum: More discussion here at Montana Headlines.
