CAMPAIGN FINANCING
Some years ago, I was in a newsstand on Broadway to pick up some smokes, and a woman came in and approached the Pakistani owner. She was in late middle-age, plainly dressed in a subdued blouse and skirt, with sensible shoes, not sneakers, her gray, short-cut hair a sleek helmet.
“I’m Marsha Morgenstern [name changed],” she announced. “And I’m running for President as a Democrat. You’ve never heard of me, but I’m here to remedy that. I plan to take out ads on tv and in all the major papers to announce my campaign and get my name on the New York primary ballot. Of course this is expensive, and I wonder if you might contribute something, even a dollar, to help me pay for it.”
Her speech was crisp and clear, no hint of booze or drug slurring, and it was only after she got to her surprise punch-line that I looked more closely at her and realized her clothes were a little shabby and her hair looked as if she’d cut it herself with a pair of shears, and only seemed sleek because it hadn’t been washed in awhile. I’ll never know her full story, what succession of personal disasters had finally driven her into panhandling. But the neighborhood was rapidly gentrifying, and she wouldn’t be the only person to have been evicted from her apartment after years of quiet life, to find herself on the street because her landlord had converted the building to condos selling for far more money than she could afford.
In any case, she had the greatest begging spiel I’d ever heard in my life. Once the dour Pakistani owner realized what she really wanted, he said, “No, no, not possible, you go away now please,” and busied himself restocking the cigarette shelves. But I turned to her and said, “Ma’am, that is one hell of a come-on, and it’s worth a buck.” I gave her a dollar, and she looked a little miffed. “No, I really am running for President, and I assure you I will remember your contribution when I win.” I nodded. “I’m sure you will. Just stay on message.” She pocketed the bill and went away. I wished her well silently, and thought a buck was cheap for an encounter which prompted me to think about political fund-raising in general.
In 1999 Doris “Granny D” Haddock walked across the entire country at the age of 89 to rally support for campaign financing reform, and attracted a good deal of media attention, although her extraordinary feat did absolutely nothing to change the way politicians get elected by outspending their opponents. Yes, John McCain, back when he was a “moderate” Republican, cited Granny D. briefly when he introduced his campaign finance reform bill in the Senate, but what he came up with, after a lot of fiddling compromise, was hardly the sweeping correction Ms. Haddock had called for. In any case the bill didn’t pass. And later McCain tried, with little success, to make deep-pocketed potential donors to his presidential campaign forget he’d ever brought up the subject.
But Granny D, a veteran New Hampshire progressive, went on in 2004, still hale, hearty and witty at 94, to run for the Senate against Judd Gregg, the incumbent Republican hack. Of course the voters, although they admired her gumption, regarded her campaign as another stunt. Gregg got another six years, the corporate media treated Granny D as just another picturesque whacko from the Live Free or Die State, and one assumes Gregg, along with every other pol in Washington regardless of party affiliation, quietly wished the old dear would accept the fact that today nobody in this country can Live Free without a ton of money, and just go ahead and Die.
But she didn’t. Instead she joined forces with a producer-director named Marlo Poras, some six decades her junior, and the two of them made a documentary for HBO about her one-sided campaign against Gregg, called Run, Granny, Run. She was far too old to run for office again, but at least she managed to pull a canny bit of political jiu-jitsu on Gregg, using her foreordained loss to the smug Republican as the pretext for her video, a sort of reverse political promotional which, according to reports, cost about a twentieth the amount Gregg spent on the spots that ran on local New Hampshire tv during the campaign.
Although the cost of her documentary was miniscule compared to what “serious” candidates for office spend to get their messages across, it was certainly higher than the cost of her cross-country walk of 1999. So she toured around with Ms. Poras, giving speeches and interviews to pitch the project and raise money. Even Granny D. had to do a little fund-raising to get her story out to the mass of Americans in the only form which registers even briefly with a nation collectively plagued by Attention Deficit Disorder. If it ain’t on tv, it don’t count, and making videos for tv costs. Sure, there’s the Internet, and Granny D. had a website (www.grannydoc.com), which covered her 1999 walk and her 2004 bid for the Senate. But although the Internet is becoming increasingly influential in politics, and access to it is cheap, so far if you want to live in the White House for at least four years, you have to do it the old-fashioned way, by buying it.
It fascinates me that the corporate media identifies the front-runners, both Republicans and Democrats, only by how much money they have raised. McCain, despite his attempt to back off from his campaign finance reform bill, was a non-starter because the corporate donors didn’t forget it, and he ran out of money. The pundits, both on the right and the left, blathered about Giuliani and Romney running into trouble with the fundamentalist Jeezly Republican voters because of their personal lives – Rudy as an evil wicked adulterer, Romney as a Satanic Mormon – but they kept on slugging it out for the nomination because they’d both raised lashings of cash, and money trumps morality and religion. And whatever differing messages Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards tried to convey mattered not at all, because Hillary raised a godzillion bucks, Barack only a bazillion, and John a measly jillion, so Hillary will probably wind up the Democratic nominee at the meaningless convention.
All that money doesn’t go just for tv spots, of course. In fact nowadays presidential candidates don’t even bother to buy spots in states that are either solidly for them or against them. The media blitz only happens in a few swing states where the voters might go one way or another depending on which candidate can afford the most slickly-produced slime-slinging against his or her opponent. Most of the money goes to organizing armies of campaign workers to man phone banks, get out the vote (or suppress it); pay for lavish banquets and events with guest-lists exclusively composed of corporate honchos at which the candidate can assure the fat-cats that he or she appreciates all the lovely money and will remain bought after taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; and meet the costs of the planes, helicopters, limousines, security, hotel accommodations and maybe the occasional bribe to a local pol, which come with transporting the candidate with his/her vast entourage around the country. Contemporary American presidential campaigns have come to resemble rival royal progresses during a period of medieval turmoil (the Wars of the Roses comes to mind), when the rivals were vying not to be democratically-elected heads of state, but absolute monarchs. And we’re the peasantry, dazzled by all that money parading by, but resigned to the fact that the outcome of the rivalry will have nothing whatever to do with our own wishes or needs. No wonder so many Americans don’t bother to vote.
So when Marsha Morgenstern came into the newsstand and asked for a dollar to support her campaign for the presidency, the only difference between her request and that of a major political contender was one of scale. Like Hillary or Rudy, she was asking for money from a business, rather than begging for spare change from passersby on the street. The newsstand, to her, was a place where she knew there was plenty of cash – I’d already paid almost twenty bucks for two packs of cigarettes, for example, and the place prospered even further from sales of its newspapers, girly magazines, candy, and lottery tickets. Follow the money, after all.
Whether or not Marsha was a crazy woman who really believed she was running for president, or just a hungry panhandler with a good spiel, is unimportant (except, of course, to her) in the context of this essay. I imagine she hit up other small businesses along Broadway in the same way, just another candidate making the rounds doing her stump speech. Substitute multinational corporations for the newsstand, the ribs restaurant, the small appliance repair shop and the bagel joint, turn Marsha’s dollar apiece into thousands from each company, repeat every day for a year or so, and you’ll wind up with the next bought-and-paid-for occupant of the White House. I seriously considered writing in Marsha’s name when I voted in the New York Democratic primary that year. After all, she promised to remember my contribution to her campaign, and, presumably, reward me after she was elected. And favors for favors received are all that count in American politics. Maybe I’ll ask her to do something about homelessness in America.