The Rise of the Plutomores
jr., r. emmett tyrrell
The Rise of the Plutomores Taking the money out of politics lets the foolish rich in BY R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. ne wonders. Is the genial Senator John McCainPresident George W Bush's...
...In 2001 it came to $1.83 billion...
...though, progressive that he is, Senator Kerry does not oppose homosexual marriage and probably will not oppose sexual congress with The Capitol Hill robot as plutomore is no act of the imagina 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001 the deceased when necrophiliacs become an important Democratic constituency...
...Will is one of the few public intellectuals who has shown a proper concern for campaign finance reform's threat to the First Amendment...
...Where would such a ruling leave my friend John...
...Colmer's retirement, Lott won his seat...
...In 1998, angered by 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001 Congresswoman Nancy Johnson's support of the impeachment of our fortysecond president whose name escapes me, one Leo Smith established a Website urging visitors to "support President Clinton...
...Senator John Kerry, the richest man in the Senate, married Senator John Heinz's fortune...
...In sum, the Court found the First Amendment schizophrenic...
...He plays by the rules...
...That's politics...
...The first of the campaign reform acts that brought Congress to its present unhappy pass was the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971...
...For though political parties will then be barred from employing writers to make political statements, surely they will not be barred from employing artists, even performance artists, from practicing their art...
...Then this "congressional aide," well-versed in the esotery of congressional campaigning, steps onto the playing field that campaign finance reform has so fully tilted his way...
...Of course, freedom of speech is more than a value, it is the law of the land, written into the First Amendment...
...In his most recent senatorial campaign last year, Lott outspent his challenger $3.6 million to $40,000, after raising $4.2 million...
...They are mostly dilletantes...
...Call it corrupt if you will...
...Is the genial Senator John McCainPresident George W Bush's sworn pain in the neck-fully conscious of the stupendous mediocrity his breed of reform has already brought down on the United States Senate...
...Tribe, the only Harvard Law School prof to place his mug and private preferences on his own personal Website for all the world to admire...
...Jackson, and one sees her sitting room filling with all the luminous minds who recently formed the Clinton coterie: Larry Flynt, Rosie O'Donnell, and Professor Dershowitz (the only Harvard Law School prof ever to run a deli on the side), and Prof...
...All of a sudden the fondest dreams of campaign finance reformers would be realized-federally financed elections...
...With all the advantages of an incumbent, namely, a complement of campaign aides and a huge database for snaring his legally limited contributions, he wins easily unless perchance he has the misfortune to run up against a Rockefeller...
...Unmindful of Senator McCain's sense of urgency and Senator Feingold's short attention span, Senator Christopher Dodd, himself an early plutomore, rose up to compliment the old boy on his poetic afflatus...
...She had $620 million of Republican money from the Heinz ketchup fortune...
...The FEC has repeatedly restrained ordinary citizens from distributing political statements...
...Consider the identical twins who lead the opposing par ties in the Senate, the Republicans' Trent Lott and the Democrats' Tom Daschle...
...Both were parties of malcontents doing damage to a twoparty system that has served the American polity well, albeit without the bloodcurdling drama of such multi-party polities as Italy or Russia...
...With keen instincts and boldness, he flies alone...
...The final form of the plutomore is the Capitol Hill automaton, those robotic creatures whose entire adult lives have been spent shuffling papers THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001 29 and holding doors for The Boss, the lawmaker whom he attends to until that wondrous day when the old goat retires or keels over...
...He and Senator John Glenn were duly cleared by the Senate...
...He had received campaign contributions from Charles Keating...
...The Court decided that the First Amendment protects a candidate's unlimited contributions to his own campaign but allows limits to be placed on his contributions to other people's political campaigns...
...You are surrounded by mostly born blanks...
...The FECA regulations have given a tremendous boost to the very rich and to those with easy access to vast amounts of donations within the FECA limit...
...Senator Diane Feinstein's duties include seeing to it that business is good for such constituents as Raytheon and Disney...
...Yet maybe there is another way to avoid McCain-Feingold's suppression of political expression even if it becomes the law of the land...
...In 1998 Daschle outspent his opponents $6.2 million to $477,000, after raising $7.2 million...
...In Campaign 2000, candi date Dayton, heir to a Forbes 400 for tune, wrote personal checks for $11 million to his campaign...
...For only the incumbent begins a race with a large enough database to raise the large number of relatively small contributions to fund a campaign...
...The Founding Fathers, who wrote it into the Constitution and considered it the foundation of democracy, thought it essential to campaigning and to democracy...
...After knocking off Senator Slade Gorton (he raised only $6.5 million) the $40-$80 million Cantwell fortune deturnesced rapidly in the dot-com decline...
...As a consequence of this tampering with political freedom, ordinary medium-income citizens no matter how desirous of a seat in Congress nor how worthy, have been reduced to the condition of drudge beasts, bourne down by regulations and contribution limits as they plod the stony path to Congressional glory...
...The only good that can be said of the plutomores' output is that it has slowed...
...Undertaken to lessen the influence of money in politics, campaign finance reform instead has opened the way for much more money to overwhelm politics-money not necessarily wellearned...
...Too late, campaign finance reform had trans formed her into a pillar of the Senate...
...More sobering, what is called "constituent servicing" s not noble...
...GeorgeWill has estimated that in running for the House of Burgesses in 1757, George Washington spent $2 per vote (covering the cost of rum and doubtless other incidentals), not much less than one has to spend per vote in the affluent 21st Century...
...The multi-millionaires who now run for Congress are spend ing colossal sums, making it unlikely for challengers to match them so long as there are any limits on contributions whatsoever...
...During the recent debate on the issue, the Senate voted to tighten restrictions imposed back in 1971 on television stations' ability to charge market rates for political advertisements...
...As for those who stole their fortunes, well over there skulks Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton enriched by her cattle futures deals, her $8-million book deal, her husband's famous pardons, and that furniture she pilfered from the White House to furnish her $1.7 million house in Chappaqua and her $4.5 million house near Georgetown...
...I am not referring to his energetic presence in that marmoreal chamber...
...It is said that he can be irascible...
...According to the American Enterprise Institute's Vital Statistics on Congress, the total number of pages per law has increased by 58 percent between the 100th and the 105th Congresses alone...
...They support her...
...That is not to say he entered into holy wedlock with Senator Heinz...
...Where the 100th Congress passed 713 bills, the 105th passed only 394...
...They are ignorant of the Constitution and the law...
...As campaign finance law has been written without regard to the freedoms of the First Amendment, so too is gun control law written without regard for the Second Amendment...
...All the search and seizure laws are also written without regard for the Fourth Amendment...
...As for any drudge animal who might oppose him, that poor wretch will be fortunate if an illegal campaign ad or Website does not land him in hot water with the FEC, as we shall see...
...But the bust came too late to burst Cantwell's bubble...
...0'R...
...To match this, Dayton's opponent would have to cor ral 5,500 $2,000 contributors, a chore that is not much lightened by repairing to Political Action Committees (PACs) whose legal limit is $10,000...
...Incidentally, both the Cantwell and Corzine for tunes accrued from those uniquely modern instru ments of wealth, stock options and IPOs...
...The vagaries of campaign finance have produced a new aristocratic political class as well-all the proliferating second generation pols who inherit the advantages of their parents' wealth, name, database, and political contacts-the Kennedys, Cuomos, Jacksons, Daleys, and the Bushes...
...Political parties could accept unlimited contributions to pay the celebrated Chris Ofili to film a series of depictions of political opponents covered in sacred elephant dung...
...Keating was jailed because he was a crook, not because he was generous with his campaign funds...
...The only unresolved question will remain which campaigners will the reformers deem eligible for that free air time...
...If private citizens are barred from publicizing their views in advocacy ads at election time, the public is all the more reliant on media...
...FECA's first step towards the great goal of federally financed presidential and congressional campaigns was its 1974 amendment allowing federal funding for any national party that has successfully waylaid a mere 5 percent of the presidential vote...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001 31 Senator Robert Byrd, the Senate's very own Marcus Tullius Cicero, erupt into a lovely reverie on the adjournment of winter for spring-Tweet, Tweet...
...The Senate's March efforts to raise the limit on indi vidual campaign contributions would not much help...
...He cannot stop legislators and their constituents from combining...
...The congressmen do not read them...
...They are the consequence of three decades of what the political classes are pleased to call Campaign Finance Reform...
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...It is said that she will use it to create a salon reminiscent of that maintained in Paris by Madame de Stael...
...Campaign finance reform has not merely aided the Capitol Hill robots who bide their time immersing themselves in the mystery of campaign regulations, but it has also aided the ability of the incumbent to hold onto his seat...
...Clearly it limits free speech...
...It is only a matter of time before the reformers successfully demand free air time for political campaigners...
...To his dismay, his Website provoked a protest from Johnson's opponent, Charlotte Koskoff, who presciently feared the FEC would pounce on her for Smith's advocacy...
...Performance artists could be hired and filmed singing friendly jingles about a candidate's many marvels and his opponent's ominous shortcomings...
...Anyone who listened to the recent Senate debate on the McCainFeingold bill might repine for the faraway days when the fat senators orated in drunken bliss...
...In 1996 Lott became Senate majority leader...
...People following the investigation of her former husband's pardon question whether those inkind contributions given by Denise Rich to HRC's personal beautification during her Senate campaign may have gone unreported-a potentially significant violation of the federal campaign laws which HRC supports even as her husband supported sexual harassment law-stay tuned...
...The electorate can decide if such campaign support is unseemly...
...A further step into delusion came in response to Watergate, which was misperceived as the consequence of big 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR May 2001 JANET WOOLEY money in politics rather than the consequence of reckless politicians in politics...
...His colleagues were, too...
...C ongress's insouciance to the Constitution is no more luminously displayed than in its campaign finance reforms beginning in 1971 and, my guess is, extending unto eternity...
...Over 1,500 Titles Available for Purchase or Rental bs Mail for a frcc cata]oguc, wvritc or call: Dept...
...Young Lott, a year after law school, became "administrative assistant" to Mississippi Congressman William Colmer in 1968...
...As we shall see, these regulations trampled First Amendment rights...
...Doubtless her Talleyrand will be the Rev...
...As for Congress's legislative output, with the arrival of the plutomores, legislation has become denser, clotted with legalese and recondite regula tions, more incomprehensible, and arbitrary just the kind of Byzantine boiler plate that got them elected...
...Some might argue that these lapses in crafting legislation betray an authoritarian impulse among the plutomores...
...I'.a, R -h-- • I h.,n,•,• Sm,.11 • f...
...If a candidate is a grafter, we already have laws for that...
...Congress also initiated partial federal funding of presidential campaigns and established a new nanny agency, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), to make candidates be good...
...Look around the Senate today, John...
...Hardly anyone knows what is in them...
...It also suppresses the First Amendment's right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances...
...Neither the Reform Party nor Ralph Nader's Green Party, which had such warm hopes for future federal funds, raised any issue that had not been duly debated within the two established parties...
...Before I went off on my Clinton binge (during which I apparently transformed a Baptist altar boy into a sexual predator, a perjurer, and an obstructer of justice and with a full head of suddenly gray hair-did I ever let you down...
...When last heard of her campaign could not even pay its Roto-Rooter bill-and why did it need one...
...Her alarm was vindicated when an FEC advisory opinion concluded that the site was an independent expenditure favoring Koskoff and subject to government reporting requirements...
...Raytheon and Disney recognize her statecraft when they see it...
...Since Campaign 2000 and the discovery that CFR is catnip to the press, you and your allies have been boldly propounding it in all its suave guises, which is to say, limits on campaign contributions, limits on campaign spending, more bureaucrats patrolling a candidate's campaign practices, andUtopia!-federally funded national elections...
...The problem is he wants more rules-rules that would give politicians and the media control of the airwaves around election time...
...FECA's collision with the Constitution is extensive...
...In 1977 the disclosed wealth of the top ten senators totalled $133.25 million...
...I used to break bread with John pretty regularly, either at my home on the American side of the Beltway or at La Colline, a senatorial haunt in the very shadow of the Capitol...
...By the reasoning of Congressman Gephardt, Smith's Website threatened the existence of "healthy campaigns...
...FECA laws prohibit certain kinds of media advertisements by private citizens, and most recently the FEC restrained a citizen from running a political Website...
...Allow unlimited campaign contributions (from American citizens and only American citizens) to all, with the caveat that they be reported immediately to the public...
...Meanwhile, campaign finance reform has encouraged the arrival of a new species of Capitol Hill legislator, the plutomore (Gr...
...Reacting to the rising costs of federal campaigns, largely due to media expendi tures, FECA attempted to limit campaign costs...
...The first type of plutomore is the rich dilettante represented by the likes of Senator Jay Rockefeller, great grand son of John D. Rockefeller and, in Campaign 2000, Mark Dayton, heir to the Target Corporation fortune...
...Like everything of value, political campaigns cost money, and the more politicians value high office, the more expensive campaigns will be...
...Increasingly it is without any regard for constitutional realities, much like FECA law...
...In 1994 Daschle became Senate minority leader...
...Consequently Congress, particularly the Senate, has become a club for the third-rate rich and famous...
...Though he does not make an issue of it, he is a fighter jock...
...It is one of those topics the solons will always return to, not because they can create campaigns free of money and ethical failure, but because futile campaign reform makes senators feel good about themselves...
...In 1988 Lott won his Senate seat...
...Cynics claim that others in the media remain mute and most actually approve of the direction of campaign reform because the more we have of it, the more influential media will be in elections...
...Senators Maria Cantwell and Jon Corzine spent $10.6 and $65 million of their own money respectively, far beyond their opponents' capacity to attract legal con tributions from individual donors and PACs...
...Perhaps the most amazing delusion is that the Supreme Court will let all this stand...
...If they do it within the law they are supposed to combine...
...Perhaps once again the justices of the Supreme Court will ride to the rescue of the First Amendment...
...What he wants is the people in control of their elections...
...Yet even back in the early 1990s, campaign finance and the extravagance of pork barrel set his blood to boiling...
...When Keating's corrupt practices came to light, John was lumped, very unfairly, in with the Keating Five...
...I'•ud JO hn.nn • ui][Oil IT i-d- • NC Jra0u II I . I,r New Titles Published Each Month...
...Campaign finance reform is undertaken not for democracy's sake but for a reformer's self-esteem...
...He spoke of the late Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), elevating Byrd to the same poetic summit, As the weather outside blew cold and gray, the solons returned to gibbering about demon money in politics and to the business of writing a bill fit for a dyslexic...
...Others steal it...
...He is a man of honor...
...The occasions were always convivial...
...tion...
...ploutos, wealth...
...Still the stain on his record gnawed at him...
...The second version of the plutomore is the media celeb, for instance, the retired basketball player, the aging entertainer, the celeb of gossip column habitue such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, friend of the Hasidic Four and of Denise Rich...
...Its record of suppressing voluntary political action is long and instructive...
...Some marry it...
...The thing is real...
...if so, he has always been serene with me and sprightly...
...In 1972, upon the Hon...
...They did not share the Hon...
...I personally heard "Cars you call hack-he:s doirrt his sit-up...
...AS • P.O...
...In 1974 and 1976 Congress amended FECA by placing limits on campaign expenditures and on contributions...
...Not more campaign dirty tricks, Maria...
...In 1986 Daschle won his...
...Since Congress passed its first campaign finance reforms to prevent Richard Nixon and the Fortune 500 from again placing his likeness in the White House when the popolo minuto really wanted a George McGovern, Congress has been the loser, as have unendowed ordinary Americans along with those ordinary Americans seeking a Congressional seat...
...This might explain the bizarerrie of communicators approving the suppression of free speech, but the media's magnificoes might become FECA's next victim...
...k, anbrrr BnrI...
...Yet when he sits down to slay a fatted calf with friends he is the best of company: urbane, cheerful, always clever...
...He was sober...
...Addressing campaign finance reform's obvious violation of the First Amendment, a plutomore from the Lott-Daschle template, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, told Time magazine several years ago, "What we have is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy...
...u iIii.,, I- F,-ki- I...
...They also swept aside the only campaign reform required in 1971 or now, to wit, full and immediate publication of all campaign contributors...
...Smith quietly dropped out of the nation's political conversation...
...Part of the grand delusion that campaign finance reform has reduced the influence of money in national politics is the delusion that it has somehow improved national politics...
...He cannot stop campaigns from costing money, and to have government foot the bill invites the same charges of favoritism that swirl around government endowment of the arts.And he must not give the very rich, the very famous, and Congress' incumbents any more advantage over ordinary citizens than they already have...
...Actually, Senator Kerry married the widow Heinz who is an even trendier plutomore...
...hus the only worthy reform is to reduce government's presence in elections...
...The American people avoid them...
...Where do other other plutomores get the money...
...In 1978, upon Senator Abourezk's retirement, Daschle won the South Dakota eastern congressional seat (by 139 votes...
...It limits paying for broadcasting that speech...
...Bob Bartley, in his Wall Street Journal column, recently noted that in the last half-year federal courts have struck down campaign finance regulations in nine out of ten cases: "Florida law regulating groups involved in issue advocacy, Colorado limits on independent political expenditures, an Alabama law requiring the Christian Coalition to register as a political action committee, a Montana ban on corporate contributions to influence ballot initiatives, and a Missouri law limiting what political parties could contribute to their candidates...
...Possibly even the National Endowment for the Arts could pay for some of this "advocacy art...
...In some juris dictions there are more stringent laws against distributing political handbills, say, near schools or polling booths, than against distributing pornography almost anywhere...
...After elaborating on the full fantasy of FECA and the FEC I shall return to this sensible, albeit unromantic reform...
...I have a simpler explanation...
...Together the Kerrys have put it in the cause of every New Age enthusiasm flapping its wings on the outer boundaries of the Democratic Party...
...moros, foolish...
...As it endeavored to thwart a real market condition, this 1971 legislation was a step away from reality and into delusion, the first of several steps into a growing delusion, the delu sion that political campaigns can be free and that politi cians' work must always be a Noble Cause, rather than a mundane balancing of voters' interests...
...This provision has given us the unedifying burlesque of Ross Perot's Reform Party lasting two elections beyond its natural expiry and Pat Buchanan's lamentable recent trials...
...For now we must add that a 1976 Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo, rendered the delusion of FECA even more delusional...
...Of all the solons and numas on Capitol Hill, John is among the few whom I consider a friend...
...The recent debate is suggestive of the plutomores' indifference to the Constitution...
...Young Daschle, fresh from a brief spell in the Air Force, joined the staff of South Dakota Senator James Abourezk in 1973...
...Arguably, such quixotic parties have already twice thrown the presidency to minority candidates, giving Bill Clinton victory over George Bush in 1992 and George W. Bush a win over Al Gore in 2000...
...Well, he might stand back, review the sorry course of cam paign finance reform and reflect...
...Gephardt's alarm over spending money to get elected...
...He also demanded defeat of Congresswoman Johnson and provided links to antiRepublican sites...
Vol. 34 • May 2001 • No. 4
