More Money, More Problems
The soul-crushing life of a senator.
Ezra Klein
Newsweek
The 2010 election cost more than $4 billion—a staggering sum. It’s large enough that some of my colleagues, like Daniel Gross, have wondered if, in a weak economy, we shouldn’t have elections every year. “Quantitative electioneering,” he calls it.
But it’s also a depressing sum. Some of that money came from small donors, people who felt strongly about the direction of their country and dug into their own pockets to make it better. That’s all for the good. But much of it came from corporations trying to buy access with winners, secret donors trying to purchase the votes that will make them richer, and ideological hit groups that delight in the scurrilous attacks that candidates themselves would never make. Pity our democracy, yes. But pity our politicians, too.
Sen. Evan Bayh is retiring this year. The Democrat didn’t lose his race, and he wasn’t down in the polls. He’s just, well, leaving. And one of the reasons is that he’s tired of the money. “It’s miserable,” he says. “It is not uncommon to have a fundraiser for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner, and if you have spare time in between, you go to an office off Capitol Hill and you dial for dollars. Then the weekend rolls around, and you get on a plane and travel the countryside with a tin cup in your hand. And it gets worse each cycle.”
The problem, he argues, isn’t just that raising money is unpleasant. It isn’t just that it gives the rich too much sway. And it isn’t just that it makes people cynical (“You want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” he says, “but they look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen”). It’s that it means you can’t do your job. “When candidates … are spending 90 percent of their time raising money,” Bayh says, “that’s time they’re not spending with constituents or with public-policy experts.”
(More here.)
Ezra Klein
Newsweek
The 2010 election cost more than $4 billion—a staggering sum. It’s large enough that some of my colleagues, like Daniel Gross, have wondered if, in a weak economy, we shouldn’t have elections every year. “Quantitative electioneering,” he calls it.
But it’s also a depressing sum. Some of that money came from small donors, people who felt strongly about the direction of their country and dug into their own pockets to make it better. That’s all for the good. But much of it came from corporations trying to buy access with winners, secret donors trying to purchase the votes that will make them richer, and ideological hit groups that delight in the scurrilous attacks that candidates themselves would never make. Pity our democracy, yes. But pity our politicians, too.
Sen. Evan Bayh is retiring this year. The Democrat didn’t lose his race, and he wasn’t down in the polls. He’s just, well, leaving. And one of the reasons is that he’s tired of the money. “It’s miserable,” he says. “It is not uncommon to have a fundraiser for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner, and if you have spare time in between, you go to an office off Capitol Hill and you dial for dollars. Then the weekend rolls around, and you get on a plane and travel the countryside with a tin cup in your hand. And it gets worse each cycle.”
The problem, he argues, isn’t just that raising money is unpleasant. It isn’t just that it gives the rich too much sway. And it isn’t just that it makes people cynical (“You want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” he says, “but they look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen”). It’s that it means you can’t do your job. “When candidates … are spending 90 percent of their time raising money,” Bayh says, “that’s time they’re not spending with constituents or with public-policy experts.”
(More here.)
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