May 22, 2010 — Andre Claridge, Partner at PC Public Affairs participated in a debate about corporate influence in government sponsored by “The Right, Left and In Between Dialogue Planning Committee” at WAMC’s Linda Norris Auditorium in Albany, NY last Wednesday evening. The debate series is sponsored by organizations such as, MoveOn.org, Campaign for Liberty, Interfaith Alliance of NYS, Capital District Greens, and a host of other groups from around the Capital Region.
Mr. Claridge focused on good government solutions that he said, “…are needed to bring trust and ethics back to state government.” One of the ethics reform suggestions that Mr. Claridge put forth during the debate was the formation of campaign escrow accounts for all political offices in New York State. “If we want to take out the influence of money in politics without jeopardizing our free speech rights and without public financing of campaigns, it’s time we took a look at campaign escrow accounts,” said Claridge.
Under Mr. Claridge’s proposal, each office would have a campaign escrow account that would be administered by the Board of Elections. Essentially, anyone who wanted to donate to a particular candidate would still be able to with no limit to the amount of money they could contribute; however, all the money in the escrow account for that particular office would be split equally amongst all the legal candidates for that office.
Mr. Claridge says he came up with the idea of campaign escrow accounts after years of watching the legislature and the last three Governor’s struggle with developing real solutions to reform Albany. “Current law and many of the most recent proposals only nibble around the edges,” said Claridge. “It’s simple, if you want to take out the corruption in Albany; you have to take out the influence of money.”
Mr. Claridge has been a candidate for elected office, managed and consulted on numerous campaigns and studied campaigns and elections for the last twenty years. He has made guest appearances as a political analyst on New York’s only statewide political program, Capitol Tonight, which is on Time Warner’s YNN. He has a BA in Political Science and successfully completed the New England Senior Executives Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
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