Dear OUCH! subscriber:
If it seems like these email bulletins have been sporadic of late, despite all the stories worth telling, it’s true. But here’s our excuse: We’ve been hard at work finishing IS THAT A POLITICIAN IN YOUR POCKET? WASHINGTON ON $2 MILLION A DAY, a popular (we hope) book that synthesizes and updates many of our bulletins. It will be out in July, and we’ll have more details for you soon. In the meantime, here’s news of another book that should be of interest.]
Ouch! Talk about returning from the belly of the beast and living to tell the tale. Here’s former California gubernatorial candidate and longtime political activist/columnist Arianna Huffington on what it was like to try to raise $10 million for her campaign last year:
“I have been writing about the corrupting influence of money in politics for a long time. But now that I’ve seen it up close, I can tell you—it’s much, much worse that I thought. I absolutely hated having to raise money. The begging, the cajoling, the schmoozing—and that was just my fund-raising team trying to get me to ‘work the phones.’ The need to dial for dollars is one of the most dehumanizing aspects of being a candidate. But it becomes an obsession. The Moby Dick of running for office. Even though you know it’s wrong, you find yourself habitually checking your daily take. Your running total becomes the perverted bellwether of your success as a candidate….The biggest problem with this money chase, however, is how it takes you away from dealing with the people you want to connect with—average voters. Instead of going where the need is, our leaders spend most of their time going where the money is.”
In her new book, Fanatics & Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America, Huffington zeroes in with her rapier wit to nail all sorts of politicians for paying back their donors with special favors. One of her main targets is California’s new governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who actually promised to throw special interests out of Sacramento once elected. She describes how he received over $800,000 from auto dealers, and then—as one of his very first actions as governor—fired the head of the state Department of Motor Vehicles, “an official with an admirable history of investigating and punishing shady auto industry financing practices.”
“Just three days after taking office, [Schwarzenegger] paid a special visit to a large Los Angeles area auto dealership, Galpin Ford, to celebrate his repeal of the state’s unpopular car tax. ‘Go out there,’ he exhorted a crowd of four hundred at a midday rally. ‘Buy cars. Buy new cars. Buy used cars.’…It must have been music to the ears of Galpin Ford’s owner, Bert Boeckmann: imagine having a world-renowned cinematic superstar hawking your product on the nighly news. The event was worth millions in free advertising. And it only cost the dealer a little over $50,000 [in contributions to Schwarzenegger] to make it happen.”
Huffington sums it up, “Sometimes payback isn’t a bitch, it’s a heartfelt pitch.”
She also shows how big money in politics hurts ordinary folks. After coal-using electric utilities gave President Bush and Republican party committees $4.8 million in 2000, the administration undermined the Clean Air Act and the Justice Department dropped dozens of investigations against polluters. The result, she reports, can be seen in just one state, Ohio:
“There are twenty-seven power plants in Ohio. These plants will be allowed to pollute more under Bush’s new policy. There are another 46 pollution-spewing power plants within 30 miles of the state borders. Nearly 2.5 million children in Ohio live within thirty miles of those plants. Just over 175,000 children in Ohio have asthma. These kids and their schools don’t have a political action committee fighting for their interest in Washington. The American Lung Association does fine work, but it doesn’t have a PAC either. And while parents of children with asthma can certainly make campaign contributions, very few of them are in an income bracket where they are able to buy access and influence in Washington.”
Huffington ends her book with a rousing call for a “New Contract for a Better America.” Among her proposals: full public financing of political campaigns. She says, “It’s the mother of all reforms: the one reform that makes all other reforms possible.”
“Think of it,” she writes. “No hard money, no soft money, no endless dialing for dollars, no quid pro quo dough deals. No more lobbyists sitting in House and Senate offices literally writing their own loopholes into law. No more hidden corporate welfare surprises buried in huge spending bills. No more dangerous relaxation in safety and regulatory standards that can be—but rarely are—traced to campaign donations. Just candidates and elected officials beholden to no one but the voters.”
We like it. To find out more, check out Arianna’s website here, or get your own copy of Fanatics & Fools by clicking here. (And if you buy the book by following that link, we’ll get a small percentage.)
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OUCH! is a regular e-mail bulletin on how private money in politics hurts average citizens, published by Public Campaign, a non-partisan, non-profit organization devoted to comprehensive campaign finance reform. Every day, we pay more as consumers and taxpayers for special interest subsidies and boondoggles because of our system of privately financed elections. It's time for a change.
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