Former Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) once said that he knew his 1980 reelection bid was over when a little old lady in front of him in the checkout line at a supermarket paid for her groceries with food stamps and then turned on him, demanding to know why he wanted to take her gun away.

That was the year that a group called the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) targeted McGovern and a number of other incumbent liberal senators in an independent campaign designed to set the issues agenda in the states where it was involved.

The NCPAC effort worked. Six of the nine incumbents the group targeted went down to defeat even though many political professionals decried the ability of independent groups, such as NCPAC, to force candidates and campaigns to run in an issues environment set by “outsiders.”

NCPAC went out of business a few years later, but since then issues groups of the left and right have tried to use either hard-money “independent” expenditures or issue-advocacy money to raise their issues in races around the country.

Candidates and their managers have never liked this sort of thing even when it benefits them. They get nervous because they want to control the discourse, pick the issues, and control as much of the political battlefield as possible.

The problem has always been that what NCPAC did and what others are doing today is constitutionally protected.

Still, they hate it.

That hatred surfaced again this year in South Dakota where it all started.

Incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson is fighting for his political life against John Thune, the state’s at-large Republican representative.

It’s the sort of race that has already received national attention from both the media and just about everyone interested in which party will control the Senate in January. Johnson is widely assumed to be the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent, so there’s an awful lot riding on the outcome.

The fact that South Dakota voters supported President Bush over Al Gore and that it’s the home of Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle (D) add to the drama, and guarantees that neither candidate is going to be hurting for money. Both parties are committed to this one, and independent groups that lean one way or the other are already involved.

In fact, attracted by the low cost of advertising in the state, advocacy groups on both sides have been running ads in the state for months. The simple fact is that a dollar goes a lot further in South Dakota than
it does in California or New York.

Neither candidate likes this and they’ve been talking about an agreement that might somehow force groups like the American Conservative Union (ACU), which I chair, to butt out and shut up so that they can talk about the things they want to talk about in the ways they want to talk about them. Thune, in particular, has been aggressive on this even while admitting that he can’t “force” us out.

He’s also been honest about why he wants us out. He told a reporter that he and others have been trying to figure out for years how to keep independent groups out of campaigns and admitted that one of the reasons he voted for the Shays-Meehan campaign finance bill in the House is that it would shut us all up.

Thune attacks groups like the ACU as “outsiders” who shouldn’t be allowed to raise issues in South Dakota even though we have nearly 7,500 members in his state and every right to talk about anything we’d like in South Dakota or anywhere else.

The problem is that the man either doesn’t know the difference between the sorts of “independent expenditures” championed by the NCPAC, soft-money advertising utilized by the parties, or non-campaign advocacy advertising — or just doesn’t care. To him, speech is speech … and he wants it controlled or stifled.

Johnson isn’t much better on these issues, but at least he seems to have some sense of the differences between advocacy and political party expenditures.

The bottom line, though, is that neither of them gets it. They both think it’s fine to try to muzzle those who might actually criticize them. It’s frightening to think that both parties are running candidates who believe the First Amendment rights of those they consider a nuisance ought to be squelched.

But, then how will that make them different from many of their colleagues?

---

David Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a Washington-based government affairs consultant.