In response to Ryan Sager's charges that the Pew Charitable Trusts helped orchestrate an astroturf campaign for campaign finance reform, Pew released a press release stating in part:

As part of its mission to serve the public interest, and to help increase public trust and confidence in U.S. elections, The Pew Charitable Trusts has invested over the last nine years in nonpartisan efforts to help reform the role money plays in campaigns. We are pleased that our involvement, along with that of many others, could play a positive role in helping to spark a national dialogue and ultimately, agreement on options for change. . . .

Any assertion that we tried to hide our support of campaign finance reform grantees is false. As we do with all of our work, we have fully disclosed our support for grantees working on campaign finance reform in a variety of forms over the last nine years, . . .

The full release can be viewed at Rick Hasen's Election Law blog here. Hasen also posts his own comments, suggesting the charges are "much ado about nothing" here. [UPDATE: Sager responds to Hasen here and here.] [SECOND UPDATE: Sean Treglia issues apology for remarks here.]

A D.C.-based attorney with experience in campaign finance is also skeptical of Sager's claims. He writes, in part

The problem isn't the foundation funding, it's Sager's assumption or assertion that Congress, or some members of Congress, thought there was a groundswell of popular support for campaign finance reform in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and that such perceived groundswell was a result of Pew's "conspiracy."

I've followed campaign finance reform pretty closely, and worked on McCain-Feingold issues for clients. No one pretends that campaign finance reform is anything but an argument among knowledgeable specialists. It's inside baseball. There's no massive popular movement one way or the other, and no belief that any such movement exists - all the participants in the debate, as far as I know, recognize it's a technical regulatory matter and argue about it on those terms. Naturally the participants recognize that it has crucial public policy consequences - free speech, the nature of democratic procedures, etc etc - but it doesn't engage the public mind like, say, Social Security or Medicare or the death penalty, and no one claims it does. . . .

I reject Sager's suggestion that anybody in Congress, on either side of this issue, thought they were responding to any massive popular demand for "reform." McCain et al. certainly pushed it because they believed in it, but I don't think even McCain ever claimed he was riding some tidal wave of popular discontent.

Perhaps. Yet I certainly think it's fair to argue that the sheer volume of media coverage made it seem as if there was a groundswell for "reform" of some sort. After all, was this not part of the basis for McCain's 2000 presidential bid? Was this not why President Bush signed McCain-Feingold? Campaign finance experts, like Hasen or my correspondent, may have been in the know, but would the average Wall Street Journal reader or NPR listener have reached the same conclusion? I'm skeptical. Moreover, if there was not a widespread perception that there was grass-roots support for campaign finance reform, then the charge that incumbent politicians supported "reform" out of self-interest is that much stronger.

I would also note that Pew has been accused of this sort of thing before. Both local environmental activists and property rights advocates have accused Pew of constructing astroturf environmental groups to redirect environmental advocacy on issues about which Pew was particularly concerned.

Campaign-finance reform was justified, in part, on the grounds that big money wields disproportionate influence on public policy. Ironically, the success of Pew's efforts seem to support that claim. Whether Pew's activities amounted to a stealth "conspiracy" or not, there efforts prove that large philanthropic foundations are capable of shaping public debate and influencing the course of public policy — perhaps even taking it where the public does not particularly want to go.