MAPLight exposes its agenda

By Dan Walters

Sacramento Bee

MAPLight.org is a Berkeley, Calif.-based, foundation-supported organization devoted, it says, to illuminating the connection between campaign contributions and politicians.

That's a worthy effort, although scarcely a new one. Newspaper reporters, among others, have been doing it for decades.

Were MAPLight merely assembling and collating data, it would be helping the public gain a fuller understanding of what politicians in the Capitol do and don't do and why.

MAPLight, however, has its own political agenda. Its executive director, Daniel Newman, has been extensively quoted in the media as advocating public ― meaning taxpayer ― financing of campaigns as the antidote to a presumed evil.

It's no accident, therefore, that MAPLight has been issuing a flurry of reports recently to support that agenda, specifically the passage of Proposition 15, which would create a pilot program of public financing.

One report made a big deal out of the statistical finding that legislators have been receiving most of their campaign money from outside their districts. That phenomenon is explained by the simple fact that organizations that contribute such money ― business and professional groups and labor unions particularly ― are often headquartered in Sacramento, although they collect money from members throughout the state.

A new MAPLight report breathlessly claims that ``business groups pay for 40 percent of California lawmakers' campaigns."

Helpfully, or so it would seem, MAPLight generated a spreadsheet that ranks state legislators by the percentage of business group contributions they have received. The obvious implication is that dependence on business is a civic malady that must be remedied.

However, if one delves into the detail of the MAPLight report, specifically which groups it labels as ``business organizations," the hypothesis begins to crumble.

Its biggest ``business organization," in monetary terms, is the California Medical Association, which is truly a labor union for doctors and lobbies to protect physicians' practices from incursions by rival medical groups, such as chiropractors and nurses, and expand the amount of money that the state commits to medical care and/or compels employers to pay. In the latter role, it often finds itself in conflict with true business groups on health care access issues.

Even more laughable is the inclusion of Consumer Attorneys of California as a ``business organization." It is, in effect, another professional labor union that devotes most of its political energy to making it easier to sue businesses in personal injury cases.

MAPLight's goal evidently is to inflate the supposed influence of business and downplay that of unions and other groups. And in doing so, it exposes itself as just another interest group with an agenda.

Dan Walters can be reached at dwalters@sacbee.com. For back columns, visit www.sacbee.com/walters. The article was distributed by Scripps Howard News Service (www.scripps.news.com).