Over the years, this page has had some choice words to describe John Liu: “creepy,” “liar” — even, uh, “liu-liu.” Today, we’ve got another term for the former city comptroller: spot on.
Liu is suing the city Campaign Finance Board for not forking over as much as $3.8 million in public matching funds during last year’s mayoral race. He claims that dealt his campaign a “death sentence.”
He has a case. No one knows if Liu would have won his primary had the CFB given him the money. But surely it affected his chances. And this is one of our big sticking points with public financing: Not only does it create incentives to game the system, it gives the boards that administer the rules enormous sway over election outcomes.
Our Mark Cunningham made a similar point on these pages just the other day. Simply by setting up the rules and then making decisions about which candidates deserve public funds and which don’t, the CFB is in fact tilting elections — even if that isn’t its intention.
Indeed, in Liu’s case, the board withheld funds because his folks had skirted CFB rules.
Now Albany is moving to duplicate the city’s setup at the state level. Gov. Cuomo included a campaign-finance plan in his budget, and this week the Senate promised to adopt some version of his plan.
If that happens, we can expect more bureaucracy, more regulations, more violations and more corruption. And somewhat less say for Jane and Joe Voter over who wins elected office.
As for John Liu, we’d never want him as New York’s mayor. But we’d rather that decision be left entirely to the voters instead of leaving it to some unelected board to make a life-and-death decision about his funding.