COMMENTS: Politics and the Power of Money

...In contrast, the Republican party appears to have made solid gains among conservative, white Christian voters, although this expansion of the GOP voting base carries with it significant liabilities, reflected in part by the resurgence of Democratic voting among Jews, and the potential threat of alienating from the GOP younger voters who do not share conservative Christian social values...

...in fact, the opposite is true...

...writing it takes place in advance of its occurrence, and every statesman is an author in embryo...

...Politics increasingly takes on the forms of mass culture, in which the picture of a thing, or the publicity about it, achieves precedence over the thing itself, since the latter is seen by considerably fewer people...

...And it is in the application of such techniques that the Republican party has in recent years moved far ahead of the Democratic party, not only at the presidential level but increasingly in contests for every partisan office...

...For the future of the Democratic party, the 18percentage-point defeat of Walter F. Mondale in the last election was far less important than the decisive failure of the party's basic strategy: voter mobilization...

...Facing a much more malleable electorate, the critical factors in politics become a party's ability to raise money in order to use the media to set the terms of political debate and finance complex, computer-organized voter mobilization strategies...

...In fact, the Republican party has, for many conservative donors, become the vehicle for ideological and political expression...

...These efforts were severely hampered by (1) requirements of nonpartisanship, (2) intense competition for grants from foundations, leading to inflated claims of success, (3) the inability to follow through on registration to make sure that the newly eligible actually got to the polls, and (4) racial conflicts growing out of the fact that such black groups as the NAACP did not obtain until late in the game an obscure tax status many of the grantgiving foundations considered essential before handing out cash...

...In one of the most interesting analyses of polling data, Martin P Wattenberg, professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine, finds in The Decline of American Political Parties that the percentage of the electorate that can be defined as unquestionably partisan—having positive feelings toward one party and negative feelings toward the other—has nearly halved from 1952 to 1980, falling from 50.1 percent to 27.3 percent...

...History has been turned inside out...

...What had begun as a defensive strategy deWhat Harold Rosenberg Foresaw The United States today is governed by professional illusionists...

...In the case of registration targeted toward Hispanics, these lists were run first against Hispanic surname files available from the census, and then against lists of households with two cars, or those subscribing to the Wall Street Journal, in an effort to find affluent unregistered Hispanics...

...These lists were then run against commercial lists of all residents with telephones and, when registered voters were "purged," the remaining names (and phone numbers and addresses) provided a basic list of unregistered voters...

...Instead of bringing to the polls more blacks and women, major increases in voter participation did emerge among two very different groups: white, fundamentalist Christians and military personnel...

...The Democrats, whose candidates have been able to raise as much as their Republican opponents, have not, as a party, been able to approach the GOP success...

...instead, the Democratic party is suffering from the kind of slow erosion of which the 1984 voter-turnout statistics are only one symptom...

...In fact, the importance of the techniques of voter manipulation, primarily through television, intensifies in an electorate without commitment to political party...

...This advantage is, ultimately, based on money...

...Events are contrived out of the whole cloth in order to provide occasions for actions or statements of policy...

...From an article on "What's Happening in America," written during the Johnson Administration in Partisan Review...

...The Republican party achieved this kind of leverage over its constituent organizations at a moment of crisis for the GOP in the mid-1970s, when Watergate threatened the party's survival...

...Not only are officials elected through campaigns of image-building based on fiction and caricature, but once in office their actions are decided not by anticipating consequences to the nation and/or humanity but by the kind of image those actions will enable them to present to the public...

...The Democrats, in the meantime, depended almost entirely on supposedly "nonpartisan," third-party voter registration drives by civil rights, peace, and community organizations...

...In an increasingly de-aligned electorate, candidates of both parties have lost the ability to depend on binding partisan loyalty for a substantial core of support going into elections...

...FOR THE MOMENT, it is difficult to see how, in the immediate future, the Democratic party can gain centrality among all the organizations from labor to environmentalist that now form its core of support...

...1984 VOTING PATTERNS point toward a highly significant change in the relationship between political parties, the partisan allegiance of the electorate, and voter manipulation...

...Participation by blacks and women actually fell by a 149 percentage point each, according to ABC exit polls, for blacks from 9 to 8 percent, and for women from 50 to 49 percent of the electorate...

...More significantly, the centrifugal forces within the Democratic party are much stronger than those within the Republican party...

...In contrast, much of the Democratic donor base remains more loyal to such issue and reform groups as Common Cause, the Sierra 151 Club, and the National Organization of Women than to the party...

...The same is true of every state capitol and city hall...

...Hispanic voting grew, from 5 to 7 percent of the electorate but, at the same time, Democratic strength in presidential voting among Hispanics declined, from an 18percentage-point advantage in 1980 to a 12-point advantage in 1984, more than canceling out for the Democratic party the gain in turnout...

...While GOP strength is growing, the party faces a delicate balancing process similar to that within the old Democratic coalition between Northern liberals and Southern conservatives, as the party attempts to keep a firm grasp on the conservative Christian vote as well as to capitalize on significant new shifts toward the GOP among the young and Hispanics...

...The success of the GOP in voter registration reflects only one element of a substantial Republican advantage in the technology of politics...

...In effect, while the GOP ran a centrally directed program in which each state effort was ultimately held responsible to the RNC and to the Reagan—Bush campaign, the Democratic effort involved a disparate collection of organizations, none of which had any structural fealty to the Democratic party...

...Washington acts by putting on an act...

...The strategy proved to be a dismal failure...

...For the Democrats, there is no such actionprovoking threat...

...The Republican party apparatus has, over the past ten years, demonstrated an extraordinary ability to develop a base of contributors, large and small, adequate to produce in excess of $200 million for the RNC, the Republican Senatorial and Republican Congressional Campaign committees, money that is separate and apart from the money raised by the candidates themselves...

...In the last election the Democratic party made modest gains in terms of fundraising, enough to finance a new headquarters and purchase a media production facility, but its receipts remain one-fourth of those taken in by the GOP...

...Turnout grew from 86.5 million in 1980 to 92.7 million last year, just a 0.7 percent increase when population growth is accounted for...

...At a different level, a deeper source of tension within the Republican party will develop between the small minority holding large amounts of wealth, and the far larger groups targeted by Republican strategists: blue-collar workers, Southerners, and students...

...In the last election, the Reagan—Bush '84 Committee and the Republican National Committee (RNC) together put at least $10 million into a highly sophisticated voter-registration campaign...

...Using varying strategies, these names were then run against precinct lists showing areas of high GOP support, or against lists showing the value of homes and income levels by census tract...

...The importance of the growing strength of the "Bible-believing" vote extended far beyond the presidential election...

...On the surface, these figures suggest that parties are becoming increasingly irrelevant...

...In House contests, Republicans have gained 16 seats, and eight of these seats in two states, North Carolina and Texas, both of which have been key targets of the religious-political movement that are coordinated by an umbrella organization called the American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV...

...While there is considerable evidence right now of a partisan shift to the GOP among the electorate, a similar shift emerged in polls taken in late 1980 through much of 1981, only to quickly disappear in the recession of 1982...

...The intraparty conflict inherent in the expansion of the GOP voting base points to what is likely to become the most important source of tension for the Republican party in the near future...

...At the same time, the percentage of voters who perceive both parties in basically bland, neutral (nonpartisan) terms has nearly tripled, from 13 percent in 1952 to 36.5 percent in 1980...

...These trends clearly point to the continuing difficulty of the Democratic party in finding new sources of electoral strength to replenish the decaying New Deal coalition...

...This erosion is particularly difficult for the party to stem when most of its incumbent members, particularly those in the House of Representatives, are confronting neither the threat of defeat nor the loss of majority control in the near future, permitting key leaders to retain a sense of false comfort in the face of a postponed danger...

...More important, most of this modest growth appears, from all the evidence available, to have been among individuals who voted for Republican candidates...

...While Democrats like to complain that the GOP raises more money because it is the party of the fat cats, the complaint is not entirely justified...

...Instead, the far more sustained trend has been a consistent move away from partisan allegiance among voters on both sides of the aisle...

...Both the Mondale campaign and the Democratic National Committee calculated that in 1984 the party had the potential to register and turn out sharply increased numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and women to reverse a 20-year decline in the rate of voter participation in presidential elecLions, and to produce a record-setting 100 million voters...

...0 signed by the GOP to take the edge off an expected massive Democratic registration drive became, in effect, an offensive strategy, matching, if not exceeding, Democratic efforts...

...First, computerized lists of all registered voters in 28 "battleground" states were purchased and, in localities where lists were not computerized, GOP personnel keypunched the names...

...Money and technology do not predetermine the outcome of elections, but they are major forces in 150 determining a candidate's or a party's ability to fully capitalize on advantages and to defuse liabilities...

...Events are made to happen for the sake of words, instead of words being used to give an account of events...

...The steady diminution of the core of guaranteed Democratic and Republican voters—the emergence of a fluid electorate— places increased stress on campaign technology...

...Fund-raising, polling, computerization of both demographic information and precinct voting histories, direct mail, the precise application of all relevant information to television commercials, issue selection, and more targeted mailings have become the terrain on which campaigns can be won or lost...

...The last major movement of voters to the party occurred ten years ago, based on the ultimately ephemeral public reaction to Watergate...

...With sheriffs behaving like movie actors, movie actors aspire to the highest offices...