I haven’t personally verified this, just heard it on Rachel Maddow last night. I trust her fact checking, no reason you have to but… Twenty five to one is given as the ratio of spending for this recall. You don’t need me to tell you in who’s favor. 25 to 1.
Reggie , fair enough if you want Walker to continue, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. Be that as it may, wouldn’t it be just the dandiest thing for people to prevail over money?
Terr
May 25, 2012, 8:44pm
262
elucidator:
I haven’t personally verified this, just heard it on Rachel Maddow last night. I trust her fact checking, no reason you have to but… Twenty five to one is given as the ratio of spending for this recall. You don’t need me to tell you in who’s favor. 25 to 1.
Reggie , fair enough if you want Walker to continue, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. Be that as it may, wouldn’t it be just the dandiest thing for people to prevail over money?
Of course, people who vote for Walker don’t count as “people”.
elucidator:
I haven’t personally verified this, just heard it on Rachel Maddow last night. I trust her fact checking, no reason you have to but… Twenty five to one is given as the ratio of spending for this recall. You don’t need me to tell you in who’s favor. 25 to 1.
Reggie , fair enough if you want Walker to continue, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. Be that as it may, wouldn’t it be just the dandiest thing for people to prevail over money?
No, I don’t really trust Ms. Maddow. According to First Read msnbc (about half way down the page)
According to our data, Walker and GOP-leaning outside groups (like the RGA and Americans for Prosperity) have spent nearly $23 million on the airwaves, compared with $10 million for the Democrats – and $4 million was spent behalf of Kathleen Falk, who lost to Barrett in the recall primary.
So that would be 2.3 to 1 if you count the Falk spending, about 3.8 to 1 if you don’t.
Terr
May 25, 2012, 10:18pm
264
And also it’s a bit dishonest to compare primary election spending vs. general election spending. Primary spending is always quite a bit less.
Operative words being “have spent”. Do you have a count for money donated and committed but not yet spent? Fat lady hasn’t sung yet, and the money tends to reach its crescendo profundo just before she does, yes?
I thought that Maddow quote was referring to money already spent. Sorry if I misunderstood.
No. But it would have to be at least $125 million to reach that 25-1 ratio. I think that is unlikely.
Strong contrast in style.
As his historic June 5 recall election nears, Walker delivers his message to voters from a safe distance. His campaign carefully limits all public access and holds events mostly at his campaign offices or at businesses that can restrict who comes in. Most appearances are announced with only a few hours’ notice.
Meanwhile, underdog Barrett spends precious campaign time mingling with the masses and making the rounds of farmers’ markets, coffee shops and parades in search of votes. His campaign publicizes events with the hope of attracting as many people as possible.
The tactics reflect two well-established political strategies and signal the state of the race with less than two weeks to go. Walker holds a slim lead, according to recent polls, built with the financial support of conservatives nationwide who rallied after labor unions helped organize the recall over his anti-union legislation. Walker wants to minimize risks and avoid protesters. Barrett, who won the Democratic nomination to oppose Walker only this month, hopes to strike a spark.
Walker’s advisers “want him in a sealed-off, tightly controlled, noncontroversial setting because they don’t want to rile people up,” said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin, a veteran of recall campaigns who worked for California Gov. Gray Davis when he fought unsuccessfully against a recall in 2003. “He can’t do retail anymore. Like it or not, he’s graduated to another level of politics. He just became the symbol of a much bigger fight.”
Barrett referred to Walker’s style as “clearly a bunker mentality. You can sort of see the formula – go to a business, talk to the CEO, selected employees, poof, you’re on the road.”
Well, I said I didn’t verify, and I didn’t, so I don’t perzackly know either.
Oh! Well, just for shits and giggles, is there a point where you might think a money unbalance is unjustifiable? For me, as an egalitarian, I’m pretty content with 25 million dollars, say, if its one dollar from 25 million people. Sort of thing boosts my confidence in the candidate’s populist credentials. 25 million from a couple of dozen fat cats? Not so much. YMMV.
elucidator:
Well, I said I didn’t verify, and I didn’t, so I don’t perzackly know either.
Oh! Well, just for shits and giggles, is there a point where you might think a money unbalance is unjustifiable? For me, as an egalitarian, I’m pretty content with 25 million dollars, say, if its one dollar from 25 million people. Sort of thing boosts my confidence in the candidate’s populist credentials. 25 million from a couple of dozen fat cats? Not so much. YMMV.
I’d say any money at all in this process is unjustifiable. Ban all paid political advertising, give every candidate an equal ration of free air time.
Terr
May 26, 2012, 2:51pm
270
You would have to repeal the first amendment to do that.
Nope, everyone can speak, but the government is not required to provide them a forum to do so.
The bigger problem would be defining who counts as a real candidate, and who’s just filing to get free air time.
Terr
May 26, 2012, 7:13pm
272
In order to ban all paid political advertising, as BrainGlutton put it, you have to repeal the first amendment.
Well, you should have said something!
And beside, piffle.
There are all kinds of restrictions on the first. Shouting “theater!” in a crowded fire, for instance. Of course there are practical limits on free speech, as well as cultural ones. Restrictions on showing a nipple on TV, in a culture where you can download 15.1 giganipples in about two seconds flat.
What scant hopes I still nourish depend more on a cultural change, starting with transparency. Let the people see who spends what to get their greasy Mitts on the levers of power. I hope that they will start to weigh that, to ask themselves how much money should be allowed to affect their opinions. Its not important that the doctrine of “Money talks, therefore it votes” should be made illegal, it is more important that it be made disgusting.
Oldeb
May 26, 2012, 7:49pm
275
I don’t see how that follows any more than the First Amendment had to be repealed to ban tobacco advertisements. Tobacco ads have been banned from TV and radio since 1970 without much complaint. Since 2010 they’ve been banned from sponsoring sporting, music or cultural events, also without incident. They’re not even allowed to put their logo on clothing.
No, you don’t. You need only get a SCOTUS in place that will accept the plain fact that money is not speech and will overturn such contrary decisions as Buckley v. Valeo.
From The Next American Nation,
Campaign financing is by far the most important mechanism for overclass influence in government. The real two-party system in the United States consists of the party of voters and the tiny but influential party of donors. The donor party in the United States is made up of an extraordinarily small number of citizens. In 1988, according to one study, only 10.2 percent of the American public made a contribution to a candidate, party, or partisan group. . . . The group of large political donors is a still more exclusive club. According to a study by Citizen Action, in the 1989-90 election cycle only 179,677 individual donors gave contributions greater than $200 to a federal candidate, political action committee (PAC), or party: “Thirty-four percent of the money spent by federal candidates was directly contributed by no more than one-tenth of one percent of the voting age population.” One may reasonably doubt that this one tenth of one percent is representative of the electorate or the population at large.
<snip>
Special interests buy favors from congressmen and presidents through political action committees (PACs), devices by which groups like corporations, professional associations, trade unions, investment banking groups – can pool their money and give $10,000 per election to each House and Senate candidate. Today there are more than 4,000 Political Action Committees (PACs) of various kinds registered with the Federal Election Commission; in 1974, when they were sanctioned by law, there were only 500. PAC money is driving campaign costs to new heights. In 1992, the average Senate incumbent spent more than $3.6 million for re-election; that is the equivalent of raising $12,000 a week in a single six-year term. Members of Congress, by comparison, spend only an average of $557,403 to be re-elected – a “mere” $5,000 a week for a two-year term. The average cost of a House campaign has risen to this level from $140,000 in 1980 – and $52,000 in 1974.
The chief beneficiaries of rising campaign costs and PAC contributions have been incumbents. In 1972, 52 cents of the average PAC dollar went to incumbents, compared to 25 cents to challengers (the rest went to candidates for open seats); in the 1988 House elections, incumbents received 84.4 cents of each PAC dollar and challengers only 8.6 cents. It makes more sense for lobbies to buy access to established members of Congress and senators – particularly those with important leadership positions – than to fund challengers, who, if elected, would have no seniority and little influence. . . . Former Senator Barry Goldwater has lamented, “The Founding Fathers would frown in their graves if they saw us rationing candidacies sheerly on the basis of money: who has – or can raise – the millions necessary to run for office.”
Democrats, when they were members of the majority party, received more PAC money than Republicans, though both parties are saturated with it. Contrary to conservative claims that liberal lobby groups dominate Congress, PAC funds come overwhelmingly from business: in 1990, 65 percent of PAC contributions came from business PACs, compared to 24 percent from labor and only 11 percent from ideological groups (including conservative as well as liberal pressure groups). “At one point,” John Judis has pointed out, “the American Petroleum Institute employed more lobbyists in Washington than the entire labor movement.”
They don’t come much more libertarian than Goldwater, and even he was appalled at this state of affairs.
From the same book, pp. 311-313:
Today’s U.S. government is democratic in form but plutocratic in substance. . . . In a misguided 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court held that Congress could not limit spending by rich Americans promoting their own candidacies. This decision was to the equalization of voting power what Dred Scott was to abolitionism. In The Yale Law Review, Jamin Raskin and John Boniface have argued that political candidates in the United States must win a “wealth primary.” Candidates without enormous amounts of money, either from their own fortunes or from rich individuals and special interest groups, cannot hope to win the party primaries – much less general elections. Indeed, the Buckley decision is one reason why more than half the members of the Senate today are millionaires. . . .
It is time to build a wall of separation between check and state. Curing the disease of plutocratic politics requires a correct diagnosis of its cause: the costs of political advertising. The basic problem is that special interests buy access and favors by donating the money needed for expensive political advertising in the media. Elaborate schemes governing the flow of money do nothing to address the central problem: paid political advertising. Instead of devising unworkable limits on campaign financing that leave the basic system intact, we should cut the Gordian knot of campaign corruption by simply outlawing paid political advertising on behalf of any candidate for public office. The replacement of political advertising by free informational public service notices in the electronic and print media would level the playing field of politics and kill off an entire parasitic industry of media consultants and spin doctors.
An outright ban on paid political advertising and the imposition of free time requirements on the media are radical measures, but nothing less is necessary if we are to prevent our government from continuing to be sold to the highest bidders. The argument against strict public regulation of money in politics is based on a false analogy between free spending and free speech protected under the First Amendment. The analogy is false, because limits on campaign finance do not address the content of speech – only its volume, as it were. It is not an infringement on free speech to say that, in a large public auditorium, Douglas will not be allowed to use a microphone unless Lincoln can as well. *
*A much more compelling analogy would be between the electoral process and the judicial system, with the electorate playing the role of the jury. In our system of trial by jury, there are elaborate rules governing the presentation of evidence to the jury by plaintiff and defendant (the “candidates”). If our judicial system were organized the way our judicial system is, then rich candidates would be allowed to buy time before the jury. Texas Senator Phil Gramm, in one Senate election, outspent his opponent by 300 to 1; the equivalent, in the judicial system, would be allowing a rich defendant to buy, say, six months to present his side of the case, while the poor plaintiff might be able to purchase only twenty minutes for his side.
You can have “greasy Mitts” too. I’m a little ashamed of that one. A little.
Terr
May 26, 2012, 10:19pm
279
I am a gazillionaire. I want to run ads in newspapers on TV and newspapers, spouting whatever political view and supporting whatever political candidate I want. All using my money, of course. Tell me how you would stop me without repealing the first amendment.
Terr:
I am a gazillionaire. I want to run ads in newspapers on TV and newspapers, spouting whatever political view and supporting whatever political candidate I want. All using my money, of course. Tell me how you would stop me without repealing the first amendment.
It doesn’t matter where the money comes from, it’s still paid political advertising, therefore (under my/Lind’s proposal) illegal.
The point here is to make it not merely difficult but impossible for anybody – including the candidates themselves – to influence the outcome of any election by spending money on it. Our only choices are that or plutocracy. Jefferson wouldn’t like our plutocracy.
I’m stealing that.