Ann McBride Norton, who led Common Cause and championed campaign-finance laws, dies at 75
Ann McBride Norton, who championed citizens’ rights as well as their political voices as president of the watchdog group Common Cause and through later work in remote parts of Asia helping indigenous people document their lives and cultural values through photography, died May 5 at her home in Washington. She was 75.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said a daughter, rock singer Mary McBride.
Norton, a Democrat who grew up in a politically connected Louisiana Republican family, joined the nonpartisan Common Cause in 1972 as a part-time volunteer. She advanced in the newly founded public-interest group and became chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill, where she was known for her shrewd political instincts.
“A key opponent in one case may become your prime supporter in another,” she told the Town Talk of Alexandria, La., in 1979. “You will find that in the world of lobbying, there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies.”
Lobbyists, she said, saw people as belonging to one of three groups: saints, sinners and savables.
“Saints are those who agree with your cause and will fight for it until the bitter end,” she observed in her mellifluous Louisiana lilt. “Sinners are those who vehemently oppose your cause and will to the day they die. People in the first two categories will never switch their opinions. It’s the savables, those caught in the middle, we all try to sway because there’s hope for them.”
In the wake of the Watergate scandal and new disclosure requirements aimed at curbing financial abuses in federal campaign financing, Common Cause saw its membership rolls vault into the hundreds of thousands.
The organization backed civil rights bills, efforts to raise ethical standards for public officials and public financing of presidential elections, emerging as one of the most influential lobbying groups in Washington. Journalists frequently cited its studies and quoted its leaders on the need for tighter regulation of campaign money.
Norton was their chief congressional emissary. She was also a frequent presence at rallies and conferences across the country and during the 1970s was Common Cause’s coordinator in an unsuccessful bid to win ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Common Cause President Fred Wertheimer stepped down in 1995, after 14 years in the role, and Norton was named his successor and the group’s first female chief executive. She pushed her organization’s 250,000 members to build grass roots support for bipartisan legislation to prohibit unregulated and unlimited “soft money” donations, which wealthy special interests give to political parties and may then be channeled to individual campaigns.
She described massive infusions of cash from tobacco and HMO lobbyists as a corrupting influence “overwhelming elections and poisoning our political system” at the expense of American taxpayers.
She formed a key partnership with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a self-described Common Cause “poster boy” for his questionable ethical behavior in connection with the “Keating Five” political scandal in the late 1980s and early 1990s.