A note from “Kamala Harris for President” among my emails this morning, under the subject line: “Is there ANYTHING we can say?”
“We are writing to ask—humbly—if there is anything at all we can say to convince you to make one more contribution to Kamala Harris’s campaign before our final FEC deadline ends. Please give us a chance to try: What if we told you that as you read this, we are getting outspent and attacked in several key battleground states? What if we told you that if we were able to increase our budget by just a bit, we’d be able to reach and turn out a lot of persuadable Democrats who don’t vote frequently—and that that could be the margin of victory?”
Another a couple of hours later from Hakeem Jeffries:
“I need to pull back the curtain and explain where things stand right now: There are 33 Red-to-Blue seats that Democrats are poised to win in November. Let me be clear:
– These 33 districts will decide the fate of our majority.
– If we win just FOUR of them, we flip the House – it’s that simple.
– Unfortunately, extreme MAGA Republicans have raised $183 MILLION to stop us.
– We’ll need more resources to expand operations in these crucial swing districts.
We urgently need more funds to give our Democrats the chance they deserve to compete and WIN.”
Earlier this week, media across the land conveyed this story, the “New York Times” version headline and subhead reading,
“Kamala Harris Has Raised $1 Billion Since Entering 2024 Presidential Race
No presidential candidate is believed to have ever raised so much money so fast after entering a race. The campaign has stopped trumpeting its fund-raising totals to keep Democrats from becoming complacent.”
Because really: how does one effectively spend a billion dollars? The honest answer is that one must place an ‘in’ in front of ‘effectively.’
Not that this implies the Donald Trump campaign is any the less darkly intoning and ravenous in its appetite for more—and more and more—cash to feed the campaign money machine.
The chief difference being that Trump’s efforts are often couched in appeals for cheesy and crazily overpriced “Official Trump Merchandise” such as $2 bills, “Never Surrender Beverage Coolers” featuring his felon face mug shot, “Talking Trump Birthday Cards for Men,” etc.
An October 9 report from the financial magazine “Forbes” compiled these latest numbers from the candidates’ respective reporting periods for their “cash on hand” :
“Harris also ended August with far more cash on hand than Trump—with $235.5 million to Trump’s $134.6 million—further widening her cash lead after erasing a previous cash advantage the Trump campaign had at the end of June, before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.”
Wherever the cash race finally ends on the fateful day of November 5, these are all staggering numbers. And if you consume any media at all across the electronic firmament, or made what you now might consider, like me, to be ill-advised donations to political campaigns anywhere in the land in recent years, you well know the absolute, relentless fusillade of additional appeals that flood your email and text streams, along with phone calls you never answer because you know it will just be more of the same.
We all know it’s a travesty, no matter what side we’re on.
And we also know, in the real world we currently live in, that no one truly knows what to do about it.
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Not that there aren’t ideas aplenty. But ideas lacking a clear and winnable plan of implementation are just so much conceptual hot air at the moment. And those winnable plans have been in desperately short supply since the infamous “Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission” Supreme Court decision in 2010, which, on a 5-4 vote, allowed for unlimited political spending by corporations under the guise of their First Amendment free speech rights.
The ruling created the memorable and sadly accurate meme of “Corporations Are People, Too.” (You can find an informative report from the Brennan Center for Justice on the challenges and potential fixes of the problem here.)
The past 14 years of dark warnings that vast fortunes would be making a hot green mess (green as in “dollars”) of our politics have proven to be resoundingly true. Freed from both previous limits on their contributions as well as public disclosure of donors’ true identities, corporations have led the arms race that has become akin to the nuclear arms race of the past half century—in which fear that the other side may be ramping up faster and better than you makes it imperative that you respond in kind.
So the machines rage on unabated, desperate for more dollars to keep pace with the often phantom advantage of the other side. Because really: how does one effectively spend a billion dollars?
The honest answer is that one must place an “in” in front of “effectively.” It just means bigger buys on everything—print, radio, TV and Internet ads, flyers, mass emails, mass texts, billboards, signs, and every other intrusion on our precious time that irritates rather than persuades us, infuriates rather than influences.
And this is true not only on the presidential level, but in every other contest down to city council races, which also set spending records every election cycle. Surely it is not my experience alone to receive identical or only slightly altered 8-by-10-inch postcards showing our smiling candidates tearing into the absolute, rapacious evil of their opponents, often on a near-daily basis in the last weeks of the election?
And who are the big winners in this cycle? The answer is the ad conglomerates taking their creative pay and commissions on every item they place, the printers and aggregators they use, and the media companies that host and process the barrage of materials that so wear out a jaded public before election day finally brings it all to a merciful end.
Is this any way to run a democracy?
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I realize this is a rant, and I am going to own it as such. But absent a reversal at the Supreme Court (fat chance of that!) or effective legislation from our nearly hopelessly divided two-party system (precious little chance of that in the near future, either), our system is stuck, and drowning, really, in oceans of money.
Yes, goodly sums of it are necessary for the exigencies of campaigning in a country as vast and diverse as ours. But with the near-complete absence of true spending limits and the ravenous appetites of corporations and wealthy individuals for influence in our political process, we have a system designed and influenced by the wealthy which, lo and behold, will be serving the wealthy too, just as surely as water flows downhill.
Meanwhile, just regular folk who deign to express their enthusiasm for a candidate by sending a sum quite a bit less less than the millions poured into campaigns by corporations and individuals of extreme wealth will endure the blitzkrieg of appeals for ever more money on behalf of ever more candidates “desperate” because they are being outspent by their opponents, compelling them to ask, “Is there ANYTHING we can say?”
“Nope!” is my short answer. My longer answer is in all the above.
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I couldn’t agree more with you Andrew. If Citizens United were overturned, would it get worse? Or better. I refuse to send money to candidates. It seems wasteful. Just think of the potential if campaign money were used for combating poverty or climate change. Grrrr
I feel a bit like Melvin Udall in “As Good As It Gets” when it comes to inbox campaign donation requests, billboards, yard signs and media ads: “I’m drowning here, and you’re describing the water.” Not that long ago in a country far, far away, money and politics weren’t bedmates, behaving like adulterers. In our country’s infancy, the idea of asking for money to finance a political campaign had about as much air as a punctured balloon. Andrew Jackson was actually the first President to open a campaign office…two offices to be exact. In 1900, President William McKinley ran his campaign from his front porch sipping lemonade and noshing Triscuits. Now, I’m not saying old time politics wasn’t immune from money’s corrosive impact on elections. In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt saw it as a threat to democracy and wholeheartedly supported the Tillman Act which prohibited corporations and national banks from contributing to federal elections. However, let’s face it. Money infiltrating election spending has evolved from a bad case of sniffling and coughing into a pandemic. Money is like a liver fluke, a particular kind of parasitic worm, who’s found a home in our political body. It sucks all the nutrients out of its USA host, eventually killing it. Ironically, even though campaign spending has gone from thousands to billions, the economics doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Kamala will spend more money than any Presidential candidate to date, and Trump may win. Will Rogers stated it perfectly: “Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.” Amen.
It makes the individual voter seem more insignificant and invisible than ever before. Of course, it’s always been that way, but we had the fantasy that door knocking and handbill passing was “making a difference“. I always remember MLK’s thought that politicians and institutions “lean toward justice”, and despite ludicrous dollars one needs to get elected (or lose) there is a small kernel of “ right thinking” in my candidates, versus the other side.
Candi, I’m thinking I maybe could have run with the headline and your Grrr as the only text; probably everyone would have understood! In answer to your question, yes, I do think it would be better if Citizens United were overturned. Not perfect, but better. It’s a lot like like the gun debate—it’s so screamingly obvious that some basic common sense measures would improve things dramatically, but in this era of absolutism and gridlock, even those measures are fought at every turn, as if it’ll be the end of the world if the wealthy can’t shower billions on their favored candidates and causes, and teenagers can’t walk into a gun store and buy a military-grade weapon.
Love the liver fluke simile, Robert, a perfect description of the syndrome. And thanks for your usual historical tidbits & contexts; they always enrich this space.
Moon, that oft-repeated quote from King was his distillation of slightly differently phrased commentary in a sermon by Unitarian minister Theodore Parker in 1853. King condensed it nicely, and though he frequently paid homage to thinkers whose words he relied on and often used, he apparently didn’t attribute this one, near as historians can tell. Fun discussion of it here.
https://www.npr.org/2010/09/02/129609461/theodore-parker-and-the-moral-universe
And yes, even though money acts as a pox on the entire political system and both its major parties, we have to deal with the flawed system and world we have in deciding whom to support. In the end, there really is a choice, and that choice always makes a difference; thanks for pointing that out.