It seems like nary an advocate is planning to sit quietly on the sidelines during the presidential election season of 2008. On the global issues side, Impact 08 and One Vote are directly targeting the candidates; even more staid, research-driven institutions are packaging their ideas in a candidate-friendly format (see Opportunity 08).

Of course, these campaigns can only speak in generalities; they cannot endorse candidates or speak forcefully on their behalf. Perla Ni argues on the SSIR blog that this is not enough; nonprofits should challenge the current rules that ban them from speaking out about politics because nonprofits, after all, are the ones who deal with platform issues day in and day out.

In this election, in which the candidates are already heatedly debating complex issues such as universal health care, global warming, gay marriage, poverty, and farm subsidies, nonprofits need to weigh in. There’s a lot of confusion among the public as to which candidate’s policies are better. Nonprofits, who are battling these issues on the front lines every day, who are witness to which policies have failed and which policies have worked in the past, can help voters make critical decisions.

I’ve seen some of the democratic debates but I am still undecided, and I would love to hear from nonprofits that I trust on these issues. I’d love to hear what my local organic food co-op thinks about farm subsidies, or what the local homeless shelter thinks about John Edwards’ universal health policy. I’d love to hear from my local Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, which has been working on peace issues since the 1960s, about which candidate has the better foreign policy on the Middle East.

I confess that I had to confer with my colleague Tarek -- who has spent more time in the dangerous legal shoals that nonprofits must navigate if they want to get anywhere near a political candidate -- to clarify what nonprofits are and are not allowed to do in the political arena. It turns out that nonprofits can legally contribute a lot to political discussion, but the lines are so fuzzy that they run risks when they get close to politics. Fear of trespass accounts for the biggest blow to the quality of debate: though nonprofits could contribute in many of the instances that Ni cites, they probably won't because of the dire consequences to their work if they are accused of, or investigated for, politicization.

The lines the government has drawn between issue-driven nonprofit work and politics are debatable, to be sure. If nonprofits could put their full weight behind a candidate, that would change the dynamic of its work and might even hurt prospects for progress on the issue itself because of explicit political ties. But in the end, if nonprofits are working on a public policy issue and political candidates are the best means toward resolving a problem, it makes sense to give nonprofits a chance to be heard when the public must make a choice between approaches to that problem.