It’s that season again. Already presidential hopefuls are touring the states touting their wares. But what kind of wares are these? All the candidates want to present themselves as thoughtful, considerate states people, but none of them wants to share the thoughts they are full of. Bill Bradley went to New Hampshire, for example, and announced himself as the ‘big ideas’ candidate, without vouchsafing the tiniest peek at just what his big ideas are.
I blame negative campaigning. When people talk about negative campaigning, they’re usually referring to the habit of digging up dirt on opponents, and sprinkling it liberally via the media. In fact, most candidates practice it in an entirely different sense: vacuous campaigning, absent of substance. They say that nature abhors a vacuum, but the physical law does not seem to apply in the world of electoral politics.
For the next year we will have the sight of candidates who want to give the impression of having strong policies. However, they will fudge them on the beaches, they will fudge them in the studios and fudge them in fundraising rubber chicken dinners – but they will never surrender their real opinions to public scrutiny.
The secret is that many politically active people have stronger feelings against things they disagree with than they do about those they support. The strength of negative feelings is apparent in the campaigns against gun control. Most polls show most American voters support gun control and the right to abortion. But the minority is very strong, very vociferous, and prepared to put money, resources, and even in some cases guns, behind their cause.
Other voters and check-writers will judge a candidate on a whole range of issues and attitudes. These single issue antis will doom a candidate on one hot-trigger issue. Such people are active check-writers so they are highly significant in the primaries, where candidates cannot rely on party funding.
In fact, many recent primary contests have been less battles of ideas, more tests of endurance to see whose money lasts the longest. You may remember that Bill Clinton was not the front runner back in 1992 – but he kept the funds flowing when others’ checkbooks dried up. Already this time, George Bush Jr has raised some $40 mn, mostly from his friends in Texas, where being friendly with the governor goes a long way – as far as a Texas Ranger on high octane horse fodder.
To outsiders, of course, it smacks of outright bribery and corruption. For example, when Clinton was running short of the readies in the primaries, he accepted an invitation to Florida for a fundraiser run by Cuban Americans which raised him some $250,000. At the event, he went ahead and declared himself in favor of more sanctions on Cuba, and was immediately joined by George Bush Sr who had hitherto rejected an amendment that would distress the US’s closest allies. The Cuban Americans, having got what they wanted for their 250,000 pieces of silver, went ahead and worked and voted for the Republicans as always.
And of course, there is the Chiquita donation and the ensuing banana trade war, as well as the Chinese donations and whatever consequences are wokked up out of that. It is possible that only the best of all policies in the best of all possible worlds emerge from this process. It is even possible that the large donations did not provide the desirably leveraged results that they appeared to, or at least it’s possible in the same sense that the moon may just possibly turn into green cheese before the next astronaut sets foot on it.
We are supposed to believe that the candidate accepts money from special interest groups, with no intention of showing them any gratitude, or that, even more implausibly, the special interest groups and major corporations just hand over large sums of money with no expectations of any return, other than the comforting inner glow of a check well-written. Anyone who believes that will surely be writing in a vote for Santa Claus for president and the Tooth Fairy for VP.
At present, the Federal government offers matching funds when candidates obey some minimal rules on money-raising. This lets eccentric millionaires like Forbes and Huffington off the hook. Whatever you say about the great American public, they would rather trust government to someone who has a proven track record of spending other people’s money to run for office. It’s good training for office, since government in essence consists of taking other people’s money for granted and spending it accordingly.
But why all this expensive hypocrisy about elections? Less than half of registered voters actually wend their way to make their mark on election day.
Here again, I must offer my constitutional advice. The candidate who raises most money should be declared the victor, and both winning and losing candidates must lodge the equivalent of all they raise with the Treasury. This will at least lend some de jure sanction to what is already de facto practice, and it will have the added benefit of reducing taxes for the rest of us. People would turn out in their millions to vote for such a sensible proposal, especially when they realized there would be no more inane political commercials that make ads for constipation remedies seem profound.
The Speculator
