In Pursuit of Votes
HUITT, RALPH K.
In Pursuit of Votes The Cost of Democracy, by Alexander Heard. University of North Carolina Press. 493 pp. $6. Political Campaigning: Problems in Creating an Informed Electorate, by Stanley...
...3.95...
...He believes that campaign discussion can be made to fulfill its social objective much better than it does...
...presents reasons for adopting alternative courses of action...
...Political Campaigning: Problems in Creating an Informed Electorate, by Stanley Kelley, Jr...
...Alexander Heard's book is a study of campaign finance, an undertaking which is something like creating the giraffe—remarkable however it coma6 out...
...The fat cats are not all on one side, and labor does not have inexhaustible funds...
...they have simply kept up with rising prices and national income...
...Campaign spending is notoriously so sketchily reported and sloppily recorded that the very thought of trying to do research on it is enough to make most political scientists wonder if they are not in the wrong field...
...The side with the most money may not win, and he who pays the piper in politics may not call the tune...
...exposes voters to the arguments of both sides...
...A greater measure of modesty in their self-appraisals would be more becoming...
...Along the way some hoary myths are demolished...
...Civil and criminal penalties for unfair and injurious attacks on candidates might be devised...
...In Your Opinion, a summary of the Gallup polls over the last twenty-five years, is included in this review only because the prediction of election outcomes is one (and the most spectacular) of the pollsters' feats...
...As usual, we have tried to do far more by law than other people and more than human nature and the exigencies of politics will support...
...It is a good book for anyone interested in politics except the reader who insists on being scandalized...
...Discussion will further this objective to the extent that it clarifies differences between candidates...
...Reviewed by Ralph K. Huitt 1r a people who spend one year in four electing a President should think it profitable to spend some small part of the other three years considering whether they do the job well, these three books have, in varying degree, something to say...
...Actually, election prediction is probably the most valid of the polling operations because the voter is confronted in real life with a situation almost identical to the simple yes-no choice posed by the poll...
...Most of us, I think, have long since forgiven the polls for 1948, and some of us were sorry so much was made of it...
...Space is inadequate to list all of Kelley's suggestions, but one point is pertinent: singly and all together, they could only improve the opportunity for rational discussion and rational choice...
...Stanley Kelley, in Political Campaigning, tries something which seems both more and less ambitous: less in the sense that this is an intellectual exercise, not requiring research in new materials...
...Little, Brown...
...Precisely what do we know, for example, when Dr...
...comes from clearly identified sources...
...The polls are useful, and they are here to stay...
...The costs of campaigning, we learn, have not soared outrageously...
...The government might subsidize both sides directly or indirectly by making television time available, publishing voters' pamphlets, and granting a limited franking privilege to non-incumbents...
...This is a book for the specialist, but for the general reader, too, who can stay out of the footnotes...
...John M. Fenton, the managing editor of the Gallup polls, is duly apologetic about the misfire in 1948 but blithely self-assured about everything else the Gallup polls have said...
...What is happily absent from Heard's discussion is the overtone of masochism usually found in treatises on money in politics...
...Kelley argues: "The social objective of campaign discussion is to encourage rational voting...
...Gallup tells us that five million Americans think they would volunteer for the first ride into outer space...
...3.50...
...Heard recognizes that elections in a democracy (and especially in a vast, rich, pluralistic, and decentralized system like this one) do and must cost money...
...American regulation of money in politics is neither futile nor even less successful than in other countries...
...220 pp...
...Brookings Institution...
...But Heard, a professor at the University of North Carolina, not only has studied money in politics since 1952 but persuaded approximately a thousand people to help him...
...tens of thousands of people give as much as several hundred dollars each...
...In Your Opinion, by John M. Fenton...
...The pollsters, who are competent professionals, know this...
...But there are dimensions of public opinion which are not and cannot be explored by conventional commercial polls...
...he therefore turns with sophistication and good sense to questions of ways and means...
...A skillful candidate can be evasive and demagogic at the final judgment if he chooses to be, and a voter can always vote just like father if that is what he wants to do...
...The result, of course, does not tell with precision how much anybody spent to get anybody elected...
...Moreover, they are not extraordinarily high compared to other free nations...
...What is most subject to question is the confident statement of America* opinions and attitudes on a myriad of complex subjects based on the asking of simple questions...
...His suggestions are much the same as those reviewed by Heard...
...more in that his goal is to make campaign discussion more rational so that the choice at the end may be more rational...
...163 pp...
...Confrontation in debate should be encouraged (this was written before the Kennedy-Nixon matches...
...But even rough records will yield what Heard wants— some insights into how money affects election outcomes, who makes campaign contributions and why, how money is raised and how it is controlled by law, the uses to which money is put, and, finally, some reforms which might be tried...
...and gives the voter an accurate view of the subjects with which it deals...
...the data simply will not permit that...
...Campaign monies are not supplied solely by "fat cats...
Vol. 25 • May 1961 • No. 5
