While
visiting Kansas City last December, I read a local newspaper story
lamenting the gradual transformation of Missouri into a reliably
Republican citadel—a red state, as we like to say. In the past, I read,
Missouri had been different from its more partisan neighbors. It had
been a “bellwether” state that “reflected national trends,” rather than
delivering votes for any particular party. But now all that was over,
and I assumed the article would go on to mourn the death of judicious
public reason—the tradition of giving rival arguments a hearing and
testing them with that famous “Show Me” skepticism.
I was wrong. Forget the death of open-mindedness. What was actually being mourned that day in the
Kansas City Star
was a possible loss of advertising revenue by the state’s TV stations.
If Missouri was no longer a battleground state, then the two parties and
their various backers would no longer fight their expensive electronic
war over the airwaves between St. Louie and St. Joe, and “spending on TV
ads in the state [would] plummet.”
This was the concern, not some airy nonsense about ideology or polarization.
That would have been a mere matter of opinion, while
this
was so hard and so real it came with a price tag. Here is what
Missouri’s creeping Kansification was going to cost: in the last
election cycle, the national candidates and their allied PACs blew
almost $21 million on advertising in the state. Given Missouri’s tilt to
the right, every last penny of a similar windfall might be lost. Even
worse: Missourians had squandered their battleground status just before
what promises to be the biggest-spending political year ever. As the
paper noted, campaign expenditures are predicted to skyrocket between
now and November.
Thanks to their own ideological stubbornness,
Missourians—or, more accurately, Missouri broadcasters—will now miss out
on all that. The
Star reassured readers that the hammer blows
inflicted on their local FCC license holders “would not be fatal.” Yet
the ultimate lesson was clear: political conviction comes at a high
cost. Unemployment in Missouri stands at 8 percent, and like other
Midwestern states, it has been hemorrhaging jobs and industries for
decades. Now it has gone and turned away the one bonanza that even loser
states, as long as they remain appropriately fickle, have a shot at
winning: campaign finance.
When I came across the
Star article, I thought it was
an outlier—a strange and peculiarly tone-deaf way to approach political
questions. Before long, however, I started noticing the same thing
elsewhere: a tendency to describe Campaign 2012 exclusively in terms of
the massive amounts being spent to sway us. Financial journalists
reported dispassionately on “how to play the ad glut,” with even the
drooping billboard industry preparing for a jackpot. “Without This
Year’s Elections The Ad Business Would Be Totally Screwed,” screamed a
January headline on the
Business Insider website.
It wasn’t just the business press that was fixated on
campaign spending. On the night of the Nevada caucuses, for example, CNN
anchorman Don Lemon could be seen reporting on economic hardship in
that state: the foreclosures, the real estate collapse, the
unemployment. The network even trotted out a Nevadan homeless person to
make its point. Then, a short while later, Lemon was back with one of
those interactive displays for which CNN is so famous—in this case, a
screen tracking outlays by candidates and outside groups on TV
commercials.
After recalling what a glorious burst of spending the
campaigns had rained down on other states as they prepared to vote,
Lemon observed that now it was Nevada’s turn. Especially given the level
of suffering there, said Lemon, “you would think the candidates may
say, ‘Hey, you know, we want to put a little money into the economy.’ ”
But now it was the anchorman’s duty to report a lamentable fact. Those
candidates were actually spending
less in long-suffering Nevada
than they had elsewhere, and some of them had declined to buy even a
single minute of airtime in the Sagebrush State. “They’re not add[ing]
to the economy here,” Lemon soberly noted. The effrontery! The
heartlessness!
Political advertising, in other words, might correctly be
understood as a modern-day form of largesse. When presidential
candidates run TV commercials assailing one another, they are playing
the role of aristocrats in some medieval ceremony, throwing handfuls of
coins to the toiling masses. And beside these gilded personages stand
the commentariat, marveling in song and rhyme at what a fine democratic
tableau it all is.
Alternatively, we might see TV commercials as one of the few
stimulus programs Republicans fully endorse. They are also just about
the only form of redistribution from the billionaire class that the rest
of us will ever see.
1
And what of the ads themselves? After filling us in on how
much each campaign had spent, CNN’s Lemon shared a few specimens. He
told us exactly how many times each commercial had aired in Nevada and
Florida, letting us calculate for ourselves the relative stopping power
of each salvo. Did people’s hatred for Gingrich continue to mount after
the fiftieth time an anti-Newt commercial had run, or were there
diminishing returns?
There is nothing new about money in American politics. It
has twisted the people’s will and infuriated the civic-minded for more
than two centuries. Efforts to restrict the flow of campaign spending go
back as far as 1757, when George Washington was taken to task for
ladling out an excess of rum, beer, and hard cider to the voters in his
district. Since then, a series of laws—including the Pendleton Act
(1883), the Federal Corrupt Practices Act (1910), the Taft–Hartley Act
(1947), the Federal Elections Campaign Act (1971, 1974), and the
McCain–Feingold Act (2002)—have aimed to disrupt the synergy between
cash and electioneering, with mixed success.
But it is different this time, in two ways.
First of all, there is the sheer size of it. Almost every
modern election cycle sees a rise in spending over the previous one.
This time, however, the increase will be much steeper. Think of the many
outrages brought to you over the past decade or so by campaign dollars:
the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; the millions dumped by friendly
billionaires into Americans Coming Together; the adventures of the Bush
Pioneers, the Bush Rangers, the Bush Super Rangers. These will fade to
insignificance when compared with the 2012 onslaught—the “coming tsunami
of slime,” as journalist Joe Hagan calls it.
How big will the tsunami be? No one knows for sure, since
today we are operating under different rules than those that prevailed
just four years ago. One way of gauging the wall of filth that is headed
our way would be to note that the 2010 congressional elections—the
first to be conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s
Citizens United decision—saw more than a
fivefold increase
in “independent expenditures” over the previous round of midterms. And
according to the Center for Responsive Politics, independent spending to
date for the 2012 elections is already 108 percent above 2008 levels.
At a minimum, then, we can probably look forward to twice as much slime
as the last time around.
We have been heading in this direction for a while, thanks
to trends in campaign finance that brought us bundlers and PACs and
527s.
Citizens United upped the ante by effectively inviting
corporations and unions to spend as much as they liked on
“electioneering communications.” What really changed, however, was
neither the abolition of spending limits nor even the touching
solicitude paid to corporations by equating their speech with that of
human beings. No,
Citizens United (and the related
SpeechNow case) altered the political landscape most profoundly by ushering in the Super PAC.
What distinguishes the Super PAC from previous
electoral-finance innovations is the deniability it affords the
candidate it supports. By law, candidates themselves still cannot accept
more than $2,500 from an individual. A Super PAC—officially designated
as an “independent expenditure-only committee”—suffers from no such
handicap. It can raise and spend potentially oceanic amounts of cash, as
long as it maintains its nominal “independence” from a candidate. These
slush funds are open to contributions from ordinary citizens, of
course. But they have become the stalking horse par excellence for
billionaire backers, who are now freed from the nickel-and-dime
constraints of direct contribution—and much of this money, being
theoretically separate from the candidates themselves, has naturally
been poured into vitriolic TV ads.
It dawned on the world that we had reached a new level of
campaign savagery during the weeks before the Iowa caucuses. For a brief
moment, you will recall, Newt Gingrich, who had foresworn negative
advertising and was behaving in an uncharacteristically congenial
manner, took the lead in public-opinion polls. Almost immediately, Mitt
Romney—which is to say, Mitt Romney’s studiously non-aligned corporate
doppelgänger, the Restore Our Future Super PAC—blitzed his slow-moving
opponent with a storm of derisive TV commercials. The spots ran day and
night, and utterly destroyed Gingrich’s standing in the polls.
Among people who follow campaign spending closely, this
seems to have been a sort of Hiroshima moment: the vast power of a new
weapon was finally unveiled. Candidates like Romney could appear to be
models of civic virtue, without an unkind or even combative thought in
their heads, while their wealthy patrons came together to heap ridicule
on their rivals, in unprecedented quantities of advertising and degrees
of viciousness. All of the hand-shaking and diner-visiting and carefully
drawn position papers were swept into irrelevance.
Romney’s carpet-bombing assault in Iowa triggered an
immediate campaign-finance arms race among the surviving candidates. But
Restore Our Future retained at least a temporary edge over Gingrich’s
Winning Our Future and Rick Santorum’s Red, White and Blue Fund and Ron
Paul’s Endorse Liberty. A few weeks later, Romney’s secret weapon
delivered the Florida primary for the former Massachusetts governor by
once again outsliming the hapless Gingrich, reportedly by a factor of
five to one.
The rise of the Super PACs, and the sheer volume of cash
they enabled candidates to devote to mudslinging without ever dirtying
their hands, was something new. Just as new, and equally alarming, was
the public’s cognitive capitulation to the process. Over the course of
the past few decades, the power of concentrated money has subverted the
professions, destroyed small investors, wrecked the regulatory state,
corrupted legislators en masse, and repeatedly put the economy through
the wringer. Now it has come for our democracy itself.
And by and large, we are pretty blasé about it. To judge by
our society’s consensus-approved commentary, the permissible modes of
political discussion are narrowing by the day. We speculate about what
campaign spending will do for regional economies, or how effective this
or that TV commercial is at persuading voters, or (at the outermost
limits of journalistic daring) whether that selfsame commercial might
contain . . . errors of fact. But what this style of commentary
virtually requires the media to ignore is that with every juicy morsel
of hate, we are becoming more and more a rich man’s country.
Newt Gingrich did not take the Iowa defeat lying down.
Instead, he turned to a billionaire backer of his own, casino mogul
Sheldon Adelson, to fill the coffers of Winning Our Future. With his war
chest thus replenished, Gingrich began running TV commercials in South
Carolina that held Romney responsible for certain unsavory deeds of Bain
Capital, the buyout firm he used to run.
2 Largely on the strength of these bludgeoning ads, Gingrich proceeded to win the South Carolina primary.
And if you happened to turn on CNN the night of Gingrich’s
big win, you would have heard the centrist pundit David Gergen depict
the whole electoral process as a kind of card game for billionaires.
While Gingrich took his victory lap in a packed South Carolina ballroom,
Gergen predicted his next move: “Don’t you think he’ll call Mr. Adelson
and say, ‘Why don’t you double down?’ ”
The line stuck in my craw. Its obvious but unspoken
assumption was that the public may vote as its pleases, but that the
parties to whom the candidates ultimately answer are the superrich, who
will expect some returns but are also sometimes willing to invest in a
sagging candidacy—buying on the dips, as it were. Even more disturbing
is the unspoken but obvious follow-up question: What is the payoff for
Adelson, or for any other major political contributor, if his long shot
comes in?
Adelson himself spoke of Barack Obama’s “quest to socialize this country” when
Forbes quizzed him about his motives. He also had this to say:
I’m against very wealthy people . . . influencing
elections. . . . But as long as it’s doable I’m going to do it. Because I
know that guys like Soros have been doing it for years, if not decades.
Foster Friess, the mutual-fund tycoon who is plowing money
into Santorum’s Red, White and Blue Fund, is also happy to discuss his
munificence with reporters. And when he does, the conversation seems
naturally to gravitate to the language of gambling, investing, and
financial speculation.
When Bloomberg’s Margaret Brennan interviewed Friess, for
example, she persistently framed his patronage as a daring investment
and potential ten-bagger. Friess, she explained, was “betting some of
[his] fortune on a long shot.” This was on January 27, when the campaign
of the fresh-faced former Pennsylvania senator seemed to be fading.
Brennan wondered whether it was time to diversify or even cash out: “At
what point do you cut your losses? At what point do you perhaps back one
of the front-runners?”
A couple of weeks later, after Santorum was declared the
surprise victor in Iowa and pulled off upsets in Minnesota, Missouri,
and Colorado, Brennan spoke to Friess again. This time she asked, “Can
you say at this point that your support paid off this week?”
The constant chatter of long shots and payoffs failed to
rattle Friess. He cheerfully played along, noting that although he had
contributed less to Santorum than Sheldon Adelson had to Gingrich, he
had secured better political results. “I’m an investor,” Friess joked,
“and Sheldon is a casino guy.”
Not that Friess is absolutely locked in to speculative
metaphors. He also describes the millions he has put behind Santorum as
the result of a political casting call. Musing to ABC News in February,
Friess listed the candidate’s strengths as if reading from a classified
ad:
fifty-three years old, starts each morning with
fifty push-ups, is the grandson of a coal miner, has demonstrated the
ability to win blue-collar votes by winning in Pennsylvania, which had
over one million Democratic registration advantage, and grew up on a
Veterans Administration hospital grounds where his father worked, and is
a fellow of modest means.
Help Wanted: Working Man with Plutocrat-Friendly Views.
I haven’t even touched on the billionaires who are making
such an inspiring display of class solidarity behind Mitt Romney—John
Paulson, Julian Robertson, Paul Tudor Jones, a Walmart heir or two. Nor
have I broached the question that is no doubt vexing many: Where are the
liberal billionaires we’ve heard so much about? Well, as it happens,
the nation’s number one progressive billionaire, currency speculator
George Soros, is reportedly not jazzed about the presidential campaign.
He is having trouble distinguishing between Barack Obama and Mitt
Romney, and his failure to take a stake in anybody’s Super PAC has been
treated as a news story in its own right.
Many efforts to grapple with the Super PAC phenomenon bog
down in the slough of advertising criticism, which offers not one but
two misleading schools of thought. One holds that advertising is
diabolically powerful, capable of transmitting into the minds of the
millions whatever views the man with the camera chooses. The other
insists that advertising is not effective in the least, that consumers
are wily and evasive, always charting their own course.
3
Both views are clearly inadequate in the present
circumstances. The idea that our votes can simply be purchased by a
large enough ad expenditure is contradicted by the burnt-out hulks of
gold-plated political campaigns that litter recent history—think of the
floundering Steve Forbes, or the tongue-tied Rick Perry, or eBay CEO Meg
Whitman’s fantastically expensive 2010 bid for the California
governorship. Yet the other argument, that we remain proud and free and
immune to the barrage, is such an obvious rationalization that you hear
it advanced only by people who stand to benefit from the present
spectacle, or are actually in some way responsible for it.
The latter category would include Supreme Court justice
Antonin Scalia, who told an audience of lawyers back in January that “I
don’t care who is doing the speech—the more the merrier.” Then Scalia
tossed in one of the great canards of our time: “People are not stupid.
If they don’t like it, they’ll shut it off.” All power, in other words,
rests in the hand with the remote. Against the scoffing majesty of the
American TV viewer, all the assembled efforts of the nation’s tycoons
are as gentle Mediterranean waves against looming Gibraltar.
As it happens, this kind of clueless optimism contributed to the
Citizens United
decision itself. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy
declared flatly that “this Court now concludes that independent
expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to
corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Got that? Independent
expenditures are by definition clean, because those Super PACs are, you
know,
independent. The court continued unfolding its wisdom:
That speakers may have influence over or access to
elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And
the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to
lose faith in this democracy.
History records that when the court made this amazing
proclamation on January 21, 2010, the electorate was in fact in the
throes of a wrenching crisis of faith brought on by precisely the
“appearance of influence or access” that Justice Kennedy declared to be
impossible: namely, the apparent power of Wall Street banks to get
themselves a colossal government bailout, an occurrence that had
prompted rallies and protests and talk-show jeremiads by the thousand.
All the judges had to do to see how wrong they were was use that
all-powerful remote and turn on the damn TV.
Like the showdown we are edging toward today, the 1896
presidential contest between Republican William McKinley and Democrat
William Jennings Bryan was one of apocalyptic rhetoric and superhuman
fund-raising. Like Barack Obama, Bryan was perceived by a certain
stratum of Americans as the representative of an alien, revolutionary
tradition. With his fiery rhetoric and opposition to the gold standard,
he seemed to embody the spirit of anarchism, or maybe Jacobin Paris. And
so his opponents came together as a class to drown him under a deluge
of money.
In his classic 1938 history of American graft,
The Politicos, 1865–1896,
Matthew Josephson tells how McKinley’s campaign manager, the
industrialist and über-fixer Mark Hanna, visited the New York offices of
the nation’s great corporations, impressing upon his listeners the
“reality of the danger” and demanding from each a percentage of their
capitalization in order to put down the Nebraska Robespierre. By and
large, Hanna got what he asked. And with it he generated an
unprecedented number of pamphlets and lithographs, fielded an army of
canvassers, and caused a chorus of “the most violent class hate” to
reverberate both in the press and on the lecture circuit.
4 Some speculated that Hanna may
have outspent the Democrats by twenty or thirty to one. And money
prevailed, of course, even if McKinley nabbed only 51 percent of the
popular vote.
This fall, office parks throughout the land will no doubt
ring with Hanna-like calls to take America back from the hands of the
Indonesian-socialist usurper. The parallel that really bothers me,
though, involves yet another visit to New York City by an enterprising
campaign manager. In February, spooked by the success of Romney’s Super
PAC—and also by a Koch Brothers conference at which conservative funders
reportedly pledged $100 million to defeat the Democrats—the Obama
campaign abruptly reversed its opposition to Super PACs. According to a
Bloomberg News
account, campaign manager Jim Messina was then dispatched to New York
City to meet with representatives of the “financial services industry”
and encourage them to chip in. During the meeting, the article reports,
Messina “assured” his audience that the president would not “demonize
Wall Street as he stresses populist appeals in his re-election
campaign.” In other words, to avoid the fate of William Jennings Bryan,
the president is apparently prepared to jettison a large chunk of his
party’s legislative and rhetorical tradition.
Here we begin to see the real consequence of all this
getting and spending. It’s not that campaign money has direct power over
the public mind—that one advertising dollar can be counted upon to
yield one vote. Nor is it true that the public is invulnerable, that we
judiciously weigh these messages and see through the lies. The problem
is that by putting such a price tag on the White House, we have imported
market logic directly into our politics. Yes, even the village
socialist will still get to vote, not to mention the village idiot. But
in order to be a candidate—to be the kind of person who can make those
calls to billionaires and get them to “double down”—Americans will have
to undergo a far more rigorous process of ideological winnowing and
executive training. And anyone who isn’t an absolute zealot about
maximizing shareholder value will fail to make the cut.
For some, this seems to have been the idea all along; this
is why companies have political action committees in the first place. In
Honest Graft, a 1988 history of money in politics, Brooks
Jackson tells us how Republican congressman Guy Vander Jagt barnstormed
the nation in the 1970s, proselytizing for corporate PACs. This
“preacher in the temple of free enterprise,” as Jackson describes him,
believed there would come a day when corporate money would act at long
last in its rational self-interest and deliver up a Republican majority
in Congress. When
Honest Graft was published, however, the
consummation of Vander Jagt’s dream was still several years in the
future. Corporate PACs had disappointed their prophet and were largely
wasting their substance on the conservative faction of the Democratic
Party.
To get us where we are today would take hundreds of millions
more, a generation of super-lobbyists, and massive K Street projects
designed to make the political market function as a political market
should. What we ended up with is a system in which politicians answer
primarily to the pressures of supply and demand, not to the blunt and
obsolete incentives known as votes.
There is a profound irony, of course, in watching the fate
of our proudly interconnected world get taken in hand by a collection of
ad-hoc propaganda bureaus, broadcasting their top-down messages of
gross stupidity via the definitive mass medium of yesterday, the
television.
But that is the way the market rolls. There was a period in
the first term of George W. Bush when the polite-thinking world trembled
to hear Republican strategists talk about building a “permanent
majority”—a new coalition that would make the GOP the dominant party for
decades to come. It is too early to tell, of course, but perhaps with
Citizens United
they have finally done it. As the syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne has
written, the Supreme Court decision is best understood as part of “a
larger initiative by moneyed conservatives to rig the electoral system
against their opponents.” It will take time before the legislative
follow-through is completed, of course, and Republicans will continue to
lose elections here and there, but sooner or later, the weight of the
money will tell. The market will speak.
