The Nation's Pulse/Where's the Bread?
Herzog, Don
New York Times, interviewing Hart, treated snippets from his "futurepast" shtick as holy writ. To make matters worse, columnist Anthony Lewis seized on the interview as full of profundities...
...an independent individual may spend as much as he likes to help out the candidate...
...and the government may not legislate ceilings to total expenditures in campaigns...
...That's something a politician should never do...
...We have allowed the basic idea of our democratic process-representative government--to slip away...
...So it takes a fair amount of money to mount a credible campaign for any federal office...
...money and politics have always been entwined...
...Writers can focus more closely on some concrete context and refuse to draw sweeping conclusions, Maxwell Smart style, about the fate of the entire civilized world...
...The list stretches on, and on, and on some more...
...It's those rather mindless commercials-campaign spots, with their five or six sentences--that consume all this money...
...a massively powerful Federal Election Commission to serve as all-purpose watchdog...
...So strip away the occasionally fulsome indignation, if you like...
...but it is still stunning...
...Here Drew's argument is undeniable: The law simply makes the flow of money from donors to candidates more circuitous...
...They initially liked the idea of political action committees, figuring that these would let them tap labor support...
...Consider Jesse Helms's description of North Carolina's independent effort: "The law ~orbids me to consult with [Reagan], and it's been an awkward situation...
...Democratic theorists have sometimes worried about how rational voters are...
...but it makes us uneasy, too...
...But America is also the country of Thoreau, sternly insisting that we don't own our possessions, they own us...
...business PACs raise far more money than do labor PACs...
...Politicians on the hustings want to have significantly more money than their opponents...
...Somehow in their general onslaught Buckley and company neglected to challenge the limit on independent expenditures by political action committees...
...To make matters worse, columnist Anthony Lewis seized on the interview as full of profundities for all generations of Americans...
...Jonathan Swift bitterly deplored the new race of stockjobbers worming their way into Walpole's government, and cried out for the good old days when corruption hadn't reared its loathsome head, when men were motivated by a virtuous love of country...
...In Buckley v. Valeo, the Court agreed with some of their arguments...
...They spend more and more time raising it, and inevitably become more and more beholden to their benefactors...
...So Drew invite~, 'some higher wisdom, or some outright cynicism: The good old days never existed...
...Media consultants aren't the only ones who know that these ads work, that they sell candidates as effectively as other ads sell the latest commodities...
...Needless to say, they miscalculated...
...And then there is money spent by so-called independent committees, money spent for the candidate but not under his purview...
...The press can help or hurt a candidate...
...But sooner or later pressure may be exerted on some bill...
...If Drew really thinks that once upon a time, representatives, carefully screened from the excess influence of their constituents as Publius hoped they would be, deliberated on the common good, well, we might say, so much the worse for Drew...
...I daresay there are no obvious or easy solutions, either...
...The latest revelation of wrongdoing in high places in American politics, of course, was that curious ensemble of fiendish and silly events known as Watergate...
...In politics right now, what is is bad...
...Since 5th-century I pofitics and Money...
...Doubtless all such sales are sometimes made...
...It's just like advertising on the market: Different groups can use money and access to make their views known...
...it can't cause him to win or lose...
...Every candidate needs money to run, and every candidate finds groups out there willing to 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 give...
...they have to earn them by mastering the course material and demonstrating their mastery...
...Aristophanes heaped merciless abuse on Pericles for daring to pay jurors: Instead of being another display of civic pride, Athens' jury, he thought, had become a place where tired old men with nothing to do sat to collect a few drachmas...
...And legislative decisions still reflect the influence of c o n t r i b u t o r s . That's not to say that elections in this country are simply bought and sold, or that bills in Congress are...
...After all, it's not just past money that matters...
...It should come as no surprise that Republicans raise more money than Democrats do...
...Politicians aren't supposed to sell lucrative contracts to old pals...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 29...
...Here Mill invites us to swing back to thinking of virtue and corruption, to melodramatic ruminations on the decline of decency...
...And he lost...
...Winning elections still does depend quite a bit on how much money one can muster to the cause...
...Instead it might betray the colossal naivet~ of the indignant...
...Case closed...
...ABSCAM is a very different kettle of fish...
...But there is a less apocalyptic way of describing the place of money in politics...
...But her argument points in a different direction...
...all sorts of disclosure requirements for contributors and the new race of political action committees...
...What effects does it have...
...The pressure need not reach the point of blatant threats and promises...
...How is the influence of money exerted now...
...They hand out allotments of money, and the fabled first one may indeed be more or less free...
...So the race goes on...
...But it also produced a Congress willing to pass a tough new law intended to insulate elections from the pernicious influence of money...
...America may be the quintessential bourgeois paradise, a land of Babbitts with vapidly complacent grins happily salting the stuff away...
...K_, q )ome observers think the courts have taken the bite out of the law...
...Now that he is demonstrating tremendous charismatic prowess on television, they clobber him for allegedly ignoring issues and call his 'new ideas' nonexistent...
...But the money going to candidate coffers, so-called hard money, may be the tip of ~he iceberg...
...It's rare, maybe unheard of, for individual votes to be bought and sold--though used-car dealers made Congress overturn a perfectly sensible Federal Trade Commission regulation forcing them to list anything seriously wrong with an automobile...
...In her latest book,J Elizabeth Drew joins a long, distinguished line of indignant writers shocked by t h e corrupting power of money in politics...
...And Drew's mighty stream of anecdotes never quite nails down her sweeping conclusions...
...If that were the case, Mondale wouldn't have gotten into trouble in the first place...
...Or in earlier years, Jimmy Carter would never have won the nomination...
...Soft money is money speat independently of the official campaign effort, money spent on such activities as getting out the vote and helping the party...
...But, as Michael Walzer has been arguing for some time, some things shouldn't be for sale...
...It's no accident, for example, that members of committees like Ways and Means receive far more contributions than other politicians: Their votes matter more to the people disbursing the money...
...they always will be...
...If it takes a less than consummately rational voter to respond to mindless advertisements, it takes a steady barrage of mindless advertisements to mold a less than rational voter...
...Or Barry Goldwater...
...In 1976, a motley collection of litigants--Senator James Buckley, Eugene McCarthy, the New York Civil Liberties Union, Stewart Mott, and Human Events--finally made their way to the Supreme Court to challenge the new law...
...WHERE THE BREAD...
...For Hart, the honeymoon ended March 12, the night before Super Tuesday, when two TV networks ran negative pieces about him, one dealing with his name and age changes...
...E n t h u s i a s t s of money celebrate its infinite convertibility...
...The quest for comparative advantage sets off a race...
...And often there need be no explicit pressure at all...
...He spoke not only of past and future but of an American idealism seeking new ways of expression--a theme that speaks just as much to voters over 45...
...Montezuma, an Antifederalist shrewdly pretending to be a Federalist, revealed that Federalists liked the proposed Constitution because it would keep property in their hands...
...How independent...
...The discovery, as Drew puts it, "that large, illegal corporate contributions had gone toward the election of Richard Nixon in 1972, that individuals had contributed enormous sums--the champion being W. Clement Stone, who contributed more than two million dollars--and that ambassadorships had been awarded to large contributors" produced the predictable lip service to purity and virtue...
...They're testimony to our willingness to believe that what is, is good...
...In that interview Senator Hart broadened out his theme in a way that I thought was significant," Lewis wrote...
...And the case against Drew might be reinforced...
...limits on how much an individual might independently spend to help some candidate's campaign...
...Righteous indignation, of course, need not signal there's anything wrong with the world...
...It may take money to unlock options in capitalist society, but for some options money is just the wrong key...
...More bluntly, if less accurately, it impeaches the voters...
...And we can be quite skeptical of the intimation that public policy is now simply bought and sold...
...It doesn't take much to realize that we can do without a food processor in Don Herzog is assistant professor o f political science at the University o f Michigan...
...This is politics, and the money surely doesn't come withoutstrings...
...Like so much else of today's muckraking, Politics andMoney is an exercise in journalism by innuendo...
...Drew, I think, would blame the groups so eager to plunk down their dollars in this exhilarating political game...
...Macmillan, $11.95...
...Not the politicians: given the situation, they're just acting rationally...
...Libertarians prize the market for multiplying our options...
...Shales was half-right: television didn't create Hart, but it does love to destroy and scoff and clobber...
...We can dissent from the suggestion that American democracy is becoming rotten at the core...
...we propagate the very politics Drew indicts so indignantly in the name of the public...
...Voters are relatively uninformed, uninvolved, uninterested...
...Drew's corrupt politicians pour money not into their checking accounts, but into their campaigns...
...And that may be...
...The only question is whether.we are serious about trying to retrieve it...
...So we got public financing of presidential campaigns...
...Unhappily, Drew's evidence on the amounts of money involved is anecdotal and piecemeal...
...But I'm inclined to think the courts simply speeded up the application of one of the only valid social science generalizations I know: Reform doesn't eliminate corruption...
...Instead, lobbyists and contributors are generally buying access...
...The rules governing its use are, to put it charitably, porous...
...b y Don Herzog Money: We may want it, more and more of it, endless gobs of it, all the time...
...So filing off to the polls, they respond to those silly commercials...
...But however genteel its mechanisms, the only name for the current system is influencepeddling...
...TV time is expensive, and so are newspaper ads, constant travel, mailings, and any sizable paid staff...
...Last year the media scoffed at Hart's concentration on issues and dubbed him idealistic and uninteresting...
...the free media no longer grooved with the paid media...
...He got a solid week of negative coverage before the Illinois primary...
...If you c a n get slick ads aired twice as often as your opponent can, or more often in prime time, you get a big jump on the other side...
...A woman deciding between two suitors would rightly be irked if one offered her a down payment of $25,000 for her hand...
...Politicians need money to campaign...
...Look what happened to Jesse Jackson when he thought he was so golden with reporters he could utter anti-Semitic epithets...
...The next evening, Roger Mudd of NBC savaged him in a live interview...
...A congressman's time is precious, and if thirty people call the office to discuss the latest tax bill and he can see only six, you can be sure he won't be turning away any big contributors...
...The congressman already knows whom he can antagonize with the wrong vote...
...There's an occasional slip of her pen here, but Drew's case is more subtle...
...Some will just happen to raise more money, and they will just happen, time and time again, to be Republicans...
...Independent expenditures for Reagan in the 1980 campaign came to $10.6 million (the figure for Carter was $28 thousand...
...Or Ronald Reagan the Republican nomination...
...But don't start thinking the press has become the arbiter of who is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee this year--or any other year...
...then the congressman-consumer decides...
...And despite her sometimes charged rhetoric, Drew has written a book that can also be read in this less apocalyptic way...
...The refrain grows rather tiresome, especially when one realizes that it sounds suspiciously like the boy who cried wolf...
...There seems to be a mutual understanding that one doesn't do things like that...
...People invent ingenious defenses for these practices...
...Television loves to destroy what it creates because it doesn't trust what it creates," wrote Thomas Shales, the TV critic for the Washington Post...
...A steady stream of doomsayers has vainly alerted countless generations that now, right now, the politics of virtue is being replaced by the politics of moneygrubbing...
...Drew too likes to sound doomsday tones: Her book ends with, "The public knows that something is very wrong . . . . Until the problem of money is dealt with, the system will not get better...
...The National Association of Realtors gave out $6.7 thousand in 1970, $1.6 million in 1980, and $2.3 million in 1982--to congressional candidates alone...
...It impeaches the kind of democracy the USA now has...
...What happened...
...sometimes we actually introduce reforms, to try to block such sales in the future...
...But that challenge has been pressed since...
...Despite its honorable pedigree, there is something different about the corruption Drew describes...
...restrictions on how much of his own money a candidate could spend, and how much total money might be spent...
...Athens, and no doubt before, Western civilization has apparently always been about to slide down some desperate precipice of corruption...
...But read her book, which manages despite itself to be instructive...
...The sources are often anonymous: On page 97, which I selected at random, 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 Drew tells us what "The young lawyerlobbyist," "A member of Congress," "Some of the interest groups," and "One lobbyist" say...
...Under the Constitution, held the Court, a candidate THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 27 may spend as much of his own money as he likes...
...What's left of the '74 election reform imposes no real obstacles at all...
...it redirects it...
...A cynical Republican, then, might think there's good reason to be happy with the system as it stands...
...Keep a wary eye out for the frequent appearance of mysterious sources and second-hand evidence...
...I don't auction off A's to my students...
...9 But Mill's main line of thought is far more sensible...
...it's the promise of future money...
...Given the race for money, and the ever-present threat of the next election, politicians have to worry about how much money they can raise...
...The Supreme Court bobbled the issue on a 4-4 vote in January 1982 (Justice O'Connor excused herself from the case because her husband had served on the finance committee of Americans for an Effective Presidency...
...But we know they're illicit, so they're hidden...
...John Stuart Mill, departing from classical liberalism's concern with good institutions, even insisted that good government depends chiefly on the traits of the citizenry, "Of what avail," Mill asked sadly, "is the most broadly popular representative government, if the electors do not care to choose the best member of parliament, but choose him who will spend most money to be elected...
...In the polls, we reward the moneyraisers...
...But it's not the absolute level spent .that really matters...
...Barbara Waiters bludgeoned him during a television debate on February 23, and it took him weeks to recover...
...The goals were to permit elections to be decided for the right reasons--namely how attractive the candidates are to the people--and to free elected politicians from any dependence on the special interests funding their elections...
...I've had to, sort of, talk indirectly with Paul Laxalt and hope that he would pass along, uh, and I think the messages have got through all right...
...Even the cynic has reason to worry, though, provided he has any commitments at all to the educating power of open democratic debate...
...every room, or that a hungry obsession with checkbook balances might not lead to the most sensible appraisals of one's friends...
...Hart's first two gaffes of the campaign came right after Super Tuesday, and the press was whetted...
...Who's to blame...
...Remember that people have been saying something like this for a very long time...
...These politicians are not pocketing bribes...
...And when they come to light, not only do we get the normal wave of indignation...
...A more modest conclusion will do: The use of money is now a problem in politics...
...But it will soon hear it again, since this past December a federal district court panel unanimously ruled the limit unconstitutional...
...A candidate has to do that on his own...
...and more...
...Or it's old-fashioned pluralism in a new guise: Out of the buffeting blows of various interest groups comes the vector sum of the common good...
...And why does it matter...
...Edward Bellamy, as American a socialist as one could ask for, told businessmen that his Nationalist movement was really quite conservative: He was, he said, trying to rescue republican self-government from the new plutocracy, the giant corporations suddenly making a mockery of American democracy...
...But these defenses are too ingenious...
...Unfortunately for him, Hart is not a humble man, and he gave off the impression that he had mastered the press in such a way that he was getting a free ride...
...And indeed the range of goods up for sale is staggering...
...But, oddly enough, it apparently surprised the Democrats...
...Judges don't overturn jury awards of countless millions to pocket cuts from thankful corporations...
...PACs, as Drew describes them (she doesn't use the analogy), are like drug dealers...
Vol. 17 • May 1984 • No. 5
