Dollarocracy (9 page)

Not by a long shot.

If Trump had spent all $270 million—more than four times the $63 million that Ross Perot, the last serious independent contender, slathered on a wildly extravagant 1992 media campaign—he would have been at an 8 to 1 disadvantage into trying to break into the presidential race.
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Yes, 8:1. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and their backers spent more than $2.3 billion competing for the presidency in 2012. They may even have spent a lot more because the reported figures ($1,112,041,699 for the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party, and outside groups for the president versus $1,246,902,432 for Romney et al.) do not include hundreds of millions of dollars in unaccounted and unaccountable dark money spending by “charities” that sought to influence the contest.
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Even Donald Trump would have had to go begging to compete in 2012, just as Obama and Romney did, for the largesse of the billionaires who invest in campaigns not to advance ideals or to elect the best candidate but to make a cold, calculated business arrangement. “You have to spend money to make money” is the motto for the relative handful of wealthy Americans and businesses that provide most of these funds. And those are the Americans that campaigns, be they Democratic or Republican, take most seriously. Put another way: for candidates wishing to succeed, fund-raising is about big-game hunting. Much is made of the 3 million small donations the Obama campaign generated in 2012, and even of the more than 350,000 Americans who wrote small checks to aid the campaign of quarter billionaire Mitt Romney.
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But the truth is that small donations are small potatoes in the overall scheme of things.

Consider this: Romney's 350,000 small donors as of mid-October gave $70.8 million. That was barely one-third of what fewer than forty major donors had given to outside groups by the same date.
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In the end, which call does the candidate or the consultant take: the billionaire industrialist with millions to spread around or the grandmother on a fixed income who just wants to do right by her country? Americans know the answer to that question.

That's the single best explanation for why roughly 87 percent of Americans make no contributions to federal or state political campaigns.
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In the twenty-five most hotly contested 2012 House of Representative races, for example, donors giving $200 or less provided only 12.5 percent of Democratic candidate funds and 18.3 percent of Republican candidate funds. Had it not been for
Allen West, the Tea Party favorite who attracted national grassroots support, the figure for Republican candidates would have plummeted to 7.6 percent.
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These small donors, the ones who contribute largely to promote their values and to be good citizens, are bit players in the game. Only one out of every four hundred Americans gives more than $200 to a congressional campaign, and this is where you start if you want to know where the action is.
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Even one in four hundred seems downright egalitarian as the scope of the emerging corporatization of our politics becomes evident. This is about a lot more than
The Selling of the President
or even
The Art of the Deal
. This is about the whole shebang. The 2012 election, which decided contests not just for president but also for Congress, dominance of statehouses, control of units of local government across the country, and the very definition of the agenda via initiative and referendum votes, saw more than $10 billion in spending by candidates, parties, wealthy individuals, corporate in-kind donors, super-PACs, and shadowy dark money groups. For five decades, the central goal of campaign finance reformers from John F. Kennedy to John McCain was to have small donors—those who invest for principles and citizenship—increase in numbers and provide the lion's share of funds. By 2012, that gambit was dead and buried. Small-time donors increasingly came to play the role of chumps, manipulated by focus-group-tested buzzwords and bandied about to show a candidate's populist credentials but having virtually no influence over candidates once in office. It is difficult to imagine that these donors will not continue to diminish as their impotence becomes increasingly and depressingly apparent. “There will be huge scandals,” McCain said, “because there's too much money washing around . . . and we don't know who's behind it.”
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This chapter looks at that $10 billion figure to help explain the transformation of our politics, and of our governing processes, that has taken place since the U.S. Supreme Court began redefining the rules of engagement in order to facilitate unlimited spending by the wealthiest American and corporations, and since major U.S. media began to cash in on the phenomenon. Americans know about money in politics, and we would be wasting our time here if we simply set out to remind them of a crisis that they see every night on television—not
so much in what remains of the news but in the ads. And the ads. And the ads. Our point here is something quite different. We explain how money has flooded every corridor and crevice of our politics, from Washington, DC, to Washington Island, Wisconsin, and has thereby warped even the most local and direct democratic processes. And we explain something that rarely comes through in the horse-race reporting of campaigns, and the slack-jaw coverage of governing by media outlets that would rather collect checks for commercials than reveal the corruptions of empire: even when the Money Power loses, it wins.

It wins prior to, during, and after elections. Long before a single vote is cast, a “money primary” defines who is taken seriously as a contender for president, U.S. senator, governor of a state, mayor of a big city. The media confirm the reality by taking fund-raising—which is easy to cover and requires little in the way of insight or analysis—far more seriously than other measures of political accomplishment: grassroots organizing, the assembling of endorsements from key players, a visionary platform. Once the candidates who will be treated seriously are identified, the campaign begins and media outlets shift over from covering how much money was raised to how much is being spent. Even when money is a bad measuring stick—as in the Iowa Republican caucuses, where the severely impoverished campaign of Rick Santorum actually caught up with and beat the immensely wealthy campaign of Mitt Romney—media outlets obsess on the money until it is beaten.
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Then they say that the candidate who somehow, remarkably, amazingly beat the money (a Santorum, for instance) cannot possibly prevail in the long run because he or she does not have . . . enough money.
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In this case, the media are right. Occasionally, they acknowledge that Mitt Romney bought the Republican nomination for the presidency with massive spending on negative ads that, one by one, defeated more popular contenders. As CNN noted, Romney did not compete in the race for the Republican nomination; he “dominated,” spending “far more than any other campaign” and, indeed, “more than the combined spending of Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.”
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But the media rarely question whether such spending is good for democracy.

Free-market capitalists they may be, or they may imagine themselves to be, but Republicans should be furious at what the Money Power did to them in 2012. It saddled the Grand Old Party with inept and frequently unelectable
candidates, not just in the presidential race but also in critical U.S. Senate contests. Even as they took advantage of the Republican fiasco, Democrats should have been just as angry because their party did not “beat” Big Money in 2012; it competed for Big Money and secured a large enough treasury to hold its own against the combined resources of Romney, the Republicans, and their “independent allies.” Obama's overall spending and that of his backers were certainly comparable with that of the Republicans and at critical stages in the campaign, superior. Obama's team and its allies had a money advantage in the postprimary period when the Obama camp defined Romney as a “quarter billionaire” “vulture capitalist” with race horses, a car elevator, and a penchant for shuttering factories and taking health care away from vulnerable Americans. Trump did not run, but the Republicans ended up with a Trump-like caricature of a rich-guy candidate who couldn't relate. The Democrats missed no opportunity to paint him as such—developing a narrative that spread from their paid advertising to news coverage in a dream scenario politically. The Obama camp enjoyed that money advantage again in the closing stages of a campaign where those themes were restated with devastating effect.
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Obama and his campaign did not have the most money. But unlike the most popular of Romney's primary opponents, they had enough money when they needed it.
Advertising Age
, which replaces empty punditry with serious analysis of the marketing game that is modern politics, summed things up when it headlined a postelection analysis “Romney and Republicans Outspent Obama, but Couldn't Out-Advertise Him: Targeting and Message-Control Carried the Day.”
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That is the real story of the president's victory—not a triumph over Big Money but an abler use of the campaign's own Big Money, with corresponding debts to pay.
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Indeed, the Obama campaign astutely worked both sides of the street. On the one hand, it announced its distaste for Big Money in politics to enthusiastic audiences; on the other hand, it quickly realized it needed to bag the big game to have much hope of winning in November.
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As Nicholas Confessore noted, “His campaign's big-dollar fund-raising has become more dependent than it was four years ago on a smaller number of large-dollar donors and fundraisers.”
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Obama held countless soirees with millionaires, like the June 2012 $35,800-a-plate dinner he had on Manhattan's Upper East Side with Wall Street bankers, private equity executives, and hedge fund managers.
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One
explanation for why President Obama laid an egg in the first presidential debate was not that he was too busy doing his duties as chief executive and commander in chief to prepare; instead, it was that he had spent the entire Friday before the debate doing three private fund-raising events with big game rather than preparing for the debate, as candidates had done in the past.
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Kantar Media's Elizabeth Wilner, one of the sharpest observers of the business of elections, explained the importance of this fund-raising: Had Obama “been outspent by a wider margin, we might well be writing today about how the outside groups helped win the air war for President-elect Romney.”
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Many older Republicans quietly lamented the fact that Mitt Romney lacked the political courage, people skills, and focus displayed by his father, former Michigan governor and Nixon Cabinet secretary George Romney. Likewise, when Seymour Hersh returned to spend significant time on Capitol Hill in the early 2000s, after having been mostly absent for several decades, he was struck by how the intellectual and ethical caliber of members had plummeted.
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It has become increasingly common for observers to bemoan the unwillingness of individuals of great talent and integrity to enter public life. These transformations are all but unavoidable under Dollarocracy. Being a politician today means engaging in endless fund-raising—hours every day spent backslapping, glad-handing, butt-kissing, begging, and, ultimately, offering deals to very rich people for donations. This comes at the expense of actual public service or even traditional politicking. We admire those friends of ours who have worked hard to have successful careers in Congress, but after the 2012 election cycle we can see that many of them might have never entered public life decades ago if they knew this would be their fate. For a generation of idealistic and principled young Americans eager to serve, electoral politics is not a viable career option. Electoral politics is an arena that will attract people on the make, whose only principle is to take care of number one, which means taking care of those with deep pockets.

When the Democrats prevailed—winning the presidency, 55 of 100 Senate seats, a solid plurality of votes for U.S. House seats, as well as the vast majority of gubernatorial races—they were still hamstrung by a money-defined politics that had Obama and his fellow partisans curtailing their victory celebrations in order to begin the next stage of wrangling over “fiscal cliffs,” “debt ceilings,” and a host of other crises manufactured by Republican politicians and interest
groups that had just been defeated. Despite the election numbers, that struggle was all about imposing precisely the austerity measures that voters had rejected overwhelmingly on November 6. And despite epic unpopularity, enough to fuel much of the antipathy toward Romney, Wall Street, with its record campaign donations split between both parties, was still in the catbird seat.
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So it was that, even when money got “beat,” money won, as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson well recognized on his “victory lap” visit to Washington after the 2012 election. The vanquished billionaire did not look like a beaten man; he looked like someone who had experienced some setbacks but who was already hard at work calculating for the next election cycle and an eventual victory.

That's how the money-go-round goes round. Sometimes you are up; sometimes you are down. But if you have the money to buy a ticket on the carousel, when you are down, you know that you will eventually be up. “Obama's victory was just a blip in the master plan measured in decades, not election cycles,”
Forbes
's December 2012 profile of billionaire right-wing donors Charles and David Koch noted. “We're going to study what worked, what didn't work, and improve our effort in the future,” David Koch said. “We're not going to roll over and play dead.”
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