Did I Make a Damaging Admission?
Jim Babka on Feb 4th 2010 10:29 am |
Tags: campaign finance laws, Citizens United, Eugene McCarthy
In response to my “Lying About the Citizens United Case” post, commenter MarkusR asked questions that I think are important enough to deserve a blog post of their own.
First, he quotes me in the piece, previewing a “must-see” video that very quickly encapsulates how damaging the campaign finance laws are to everyday people…
Participatory democracy suffers under such a regime, as in very real, down-to-earth case of Karen Sampson, who found that “passing a hat” was legally insufficient for neighbors engaged in local activism.
Then, he asks two questions (which I’ve numbered for convenience)…
1) Is this an admission that the bottom half of America’s economic ladder is politically powerless? 2) And that they should rely on those with the wealth and the corporations to look out after them during election cycles?
My answers…
1) The more money that’s spent upon a candidate the less marginal effect it has. In fact, incumbents can easily reach a point where they overspend, and actually hurting their campaign, but only if challengers can provoke them to do so.
The primary problem is a considerable lack of new money from new/diverse perspectives. These funds rarely arrive due to these incumbent protection acts. Reduce the regulation, more arrives. As more arrives the odds that the electoral outcome will differ, increases.
Those new dollars given to an outsider, proportionally, have more power than each of the establishment’s later dollars — an argument of marginal utility. Campaigns…
- Can and have been won, by outsiders, who spent considerably less than the insiders. In fact, most winning challengers for Congress are outspent by the incumbent they defeat.
- Are never won by outsiders who spend little or nothing at all. I know of no exceptions.
- Can’t possibly be won if the outsiders give up in the face of expensive regulation.
So to be precise, political power for the “bottom half” as you put it, is greatly reduced by the campaign finance laws. In politics, at present, nothing else marginalizes regular folks with views divergent from the establishment more than these laws.
2) It is possible that the wealthy can and will look out for the “bottom half,” as you put it, if they too are unregulated.
Democrat, Eugene McCarthy wanted to stop the Vietnam War. He challenged a sitting President and caused Lyndon Johnson to drop out of a re-election race because Johnson’s electoral vulnerability was revealed during the New Hampshire Primary.
McCarthy had the backing of a small cadre of very large donors who helped him launch the first, modern television ad campaign, and that was why he scored a threatening percentage of votes. What they did for him became officially illegal in 1974.
McCarthy was, just a few years later, a co-appellant with Senator Buckley, a conservative New York politician, challenging the Federal Election Campaign Act in the Supreme Court. Mr. McCarthy is no longer with us. But he told me, in written correspondence back in 2000, that if the campaign finances laws had been in effect in 1968, Lyndon Johnson would’ve been the Democratic Party nominee, and his campaign would’ve been impossible.
Great, outsider candidates need the money much more desperately than the insider, front-runners do. And if they get it, they can become the establishment candidate’s worst nightmare.
An additional, relevant point…
There’s been some serious demonizing of the word “corporation,” into which the self-interested, mainstream media tapped in the wake of the Citizens United decision. It’s interesting how you can utter a word, and it has connotation and depth of meaning that differs, sometimes wildly, from the factual truth. One says “corporation,” especially with an Olbermann-esque scowl, and suddenly, we’re talking about Dow Chemical, Archer-Daniels Midland, and AIG.
But most corporations in this country are mom-and-pop outfits. This morning, I was corresponding with a vendor who provides services to my NON-PROFIT, ADVOCACY corporation (a coalition of regular citizens). His company is incorporated. He has a staff of three, and he’s the only full-time employee of it.
If the mom-and-pop corporation wants to band with other citizens to support a non-profit advocacy corporation in promoting a particular political message, what is the harm in that? The citizens can either decide to agree or disagree. Corporate spending, particularly that which challenges the orthodox position, has no hypnotic powers over the population.
To say that this spending of funds on advertising is dangerous, seems to me, to be an argument that citizens can’t resist marketing messages — an insult to their intelligence which undermines the very notion of democracy, and a logical conundrum in those situations where the marketing messages diverge and disagree.
Hardball delenda est.
Filed in The Bench, The Bureau
Challengers can overspend too. In a recent campaign, an overfunded (by his national party) local challenger had auto-dialers calling my home at a minimum of once per evening. We were also getting junk mail and flyers on our door daily. I sent an e-mail requesting they take me off the list or I would vote for their opponent (the incumbent). The call frequency went up (2 or 3 times a night), I voted for the incumbent. The challenger did not win, and has disappeared from the political scene. The voters were insulted by the massive, outsider marketing message.
But he told me, in written correspondence back in 2000, that if the campaign finances laws had been in effect in 1968, Lyndon Johnson would’ve been the Democratic Party nominee, and his campaign would’ve been impossible.
I agree with your position on the Citizen’s United case, but would think that McCarthy would have just had to modify what he did at the margins to fit in with current rules, vice a radical near impossible restructuring.
Obama used the same strategy, gathering a early cadre of big donors (and more importantly, those that had the networks to raise more money from others) to build an organization that could take on the ‘establishment’s candidate’ Hillary Clinton.
(while also noting the analogy between an incumbent president and the wife of a president whose party’s been out of power for 6 years is not the strongest)
As a matter of fact, is it the mom-and-pop corporations that engage in most of the campaign spending? (I really don’t know, but common sense tells me that it is the non-mom-and-pop corporations that do most of the spending. However, common sense is often wrong, especially my common sense.)
I suspect that if a mom-and-pop corporation wants to band with other citizens, mom and pop could simply band together with them as individuals, and it wouldn’t be necessary to do so as a corporation.
Is campaign finance regulation devoted solely to advertising dollars, or does it also deal with non-advertising expenses of the campaign, such as travel expenses and the expenses involved in hiring professional campaigners and in coordinating volunteers? I suppose it’s hard to draw a firm line between advertising-related expenses and others (travel=campaigning=in-person advertising, etc.), but it seems that a large campaign needs at least some money to do the basics.
For the record, I agree with the result in Citizens United and agree with you (and with Mr. Ridgely, per his post on the subject). But I’m still disturbed by the importance of money in political campaigns (in fact, I believe most campaign finance reform actually makes money even more important), but I am at a loss to conjure a solution.
Not campaign finance regulation as a whole, but the law at issue in CU only concerned independent corporate expenditures on advertising.
Jim,
You are right on target in this post. There has been some political science research on money and campaigns, particularly about the value of equal spending for incumbents. If I recall correctly, their odds of winning if they spend less than the incumbents is very low (which does not contradict your point that some still win), but become roughly 50-50 if they can spend equal or more than the incumbent. If I can find that, I’ll pass it on to you.
Re: Corporations. I remember some liberal friends of mine who strongly supported McCain-Feingold being shocked when they realized that it also applied to non-profits that were legally incorporated. In their mind, that wasn’t the intent, but as you note, they didn’t understand what the word “corporation” meant in law.
Pierre,
How can campaigns be run without money? The single most important campaign task for a challenger is to get name-recognition. Once you have good name recognition, you have a good chance of success. And for all candidates in a particular campaign, how do you get your message out to people? Advertising of various types is a must. Campaign events are a must, and they cost money. A staff is crucial, and those people cost money. Space for a campaign headquarters, the furniture, the computers, and the telephones, must all be rented. To take money out of campaigns is to doom the public to ignorance about their candidates, and/or it is to hand an insuperable advantage to incumbents because, for example, my congressman regularly sends me information pamphlets telling me what a great job he’s doing. It’s not technically campaign material but a constituent information service, so it’s paid for by tax dollars. Of course it works as campaign material, too (even if the politician was somehow unaware of that fact, it still would).
We spend more each year on dog food, and more each year on potato chips, than we spend in a campaign cycle. If elections are more important than potato chips–and I venture to say they are–then we should ask whether we’re spending enough on them.
[...] campaign finance, the regulations do the reverse of the intent, which is not an unusual situation I’d offer, e.g., affirmative [...]
[...] campaign finance, the regulations do the reverse of the intent, which is not an unusual situation I’d offer, e.g., affirmative [...]
It occurs to me that if you ban or restrict corporations from political activity, you may end up favouring the rich.
Bill Gates doesn’t need a corporation to influence elections, he can bankroll political campaigns on his lonesome. Ordinary folks though, can’t easily make a splash without joining forces, and that’s what corporations are about: pooling capital to achieve a common aim.