Thompson defends campaign donation limit

[Ron Burgundy]

AP - Fred Thompson on Wednesday defended his support for limits on campaign contributions — a sore point among many fellow Republicans — and said rival Mitt Romney had reversed his view on the issue.

At an eastern Iowa campaign event, a man in the audience said he liked the former Tennessee senator's conservative thinking on most issues but questioned his support for the McCain-Feingold Act. The campaign finance overhaul, which became law in 2002, caps contributions and is disliked by many in the GOP.

"A lot of my Republican colleagues still have a hard time with it — they don't understand it and I appreciate that. But standing up, putting the government in the right place to do its job, to do things as best we can to minimize the temptation and the opportunity for corruption ... is still a valid, solid, conservative concept that I stand for," Thompson said.

A top adviser to Romney has criticized Thompson for that view, and earlier this year, Romney himself criticized another GOP rival, John McCain, for co-authoring the fundraising law.

When asked about such critics, Thompson responded, "Bring them on," and suggested Romney and his staff need to re-examine the former Massachusetts governor's record.

"Mitt Romney not only was for campaign reform and McCain-Feingold, he supported public financing," Thompson said. "So, I'd love to have a little discussion with him on it."

He added: "He's changed his position on that just as he's done on so many other things."

Romney spokesman Tim Albrecht said Thompson played a major role in crafting the legislation, and vowed that his boss won't relent in his disagreement with his Republican rivals on the issue.

Albrecht called the legislation "an abomination that restricted the First Amendment rights of conservative advocacy groups who wanted their voice heard in the political process."

Thompson said contribution limits had been in place for many years at the $1,000 level, but he believed that was too low. He says he helped to double that amount and bring it into line with inflation. Currently, the limit on contributions is $2,300.

"The rule has been, you've got to have money to run in politics, but we're not going to make the amount so high that it looks as though there is undue influence," he said.

Thompson said he doesn't like some provisions in the McCain-Feingold legislation, including one that limits contributions to some political organizations to the same level as individual contributions.

"That was an error. I was wrong about that, I wouldn't do that again," he said.

He blamed former President Clinton and political consultant Dick Morris for a windfall of soft money in the 1990s that corrupted the system and led to the need for reform.

"They didn't invent it, but they pretty much did, and they certainly perfected it, the so-called soft money deal," Thompson said.

Instead of blowing the whistle on such corruption, he said Republicans joined up.

"We started doing the same thing, and it became a soft-money race. The little guy ... got lost in the shuffle," he said.

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071219/ap_po/thompson_iowa [link]