WASHINGTON -- From gwbush.com to hillary200.org, last year's election was a boom time for political parodists.
It also led to a law, which President Clinton signed in November 1999, demanding that the Commerce Department promptly investigate whether such tongue-in-cheek humor confuses Americans and "disrupts the electoral process."
Nope. It doesn't. No worries at all. Those were the results the administration released late Thursday, with just one day left before Clinton leaves office.
An announcement from the Patent and Trademark Office, part of the Commerce Department, concludes in typically understated bureaucratese that there's no pressing need for "a centralized accurate list of official candidates and potential candidates" for public office.
The report's reasoning isn't as much principled as practical: How would such a system work? Who would maintain the master list of government-approved websites? What about existing websites that already use a politician's name?
One obvious choice to regulate this mess is the Federal Election Commission. After all, the FEC already keeps track of officially declared candidates, though only for federal office.
In fact, one version of an unsuccessful bill introduced in the last Congress, H.R. 3028, would have created a second-level domain name under .us, like .politics.us or .elections.us, exclusively for use by politicians.
Problem is, the FEC doesn't want the job.
"Given the large number of federal, state and local candidates and officeholders, compiling and maintaining a complete list of all persons who are eligible would likely be a sizable undertaking.... The commission does not have the resources to assume responsibility for a task of this magnitude," the FEC said in a March 2000 letter to the Commerce Department.
The most the FEC is willing to do, it said in the letter, is compile a list of links to "the official websites of all current federal candidates" and campaign committees.
That's what's known in Washington as bureaucratic infighting, or buck-passing, and maybe a little of both. In any case, the first round went to the FEC.
Given that anything-but-enthusiastic response from America's top electocrats, the Commerce Department's PTO essentially threw up its hands. Its report concluded that even though some members of the public writing official comments wanted the FEC to get involved, the agency wouldn't budge.
In comments submitted to the PTO last year, the Democratic Party suggested creating .pol.us or .elect.us or some kind of seal of approval.
Even if the FEC changed its mind, the report advised, there could be First Amendment problems afoot. After all, political parody and complaints about the press are as venerable a tradition as the presidency itself.
Even Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, once complained that: "Our newspapers, for the most part, present only the caricatures of disaffected minds. Indeed, the abuses of the freedom of the press here have been carried to a length never before known or borne by any civilized nation."
The 1999 law ordering the report asked for advice on how to protect "the public from registration of domain names that include the personal names of government officials, official candidates, and potential official candidates for Federal, State, or local political office in the United States, and the use of such domain names in a manner that disrupts the electoral process or the public's ability to access accurate and reliable information regarding such individuals."
The report also addressed other areas, such as general cybersquatting, and said the Clinton administration supported ICANN's dispute-resolution process. It also said the "time is not ripe" for new laws in the area.
