Does It Infuriate Anyone That You Can Now Buy The Presidency?
By Anita Finlay ("Ani") on December 7, 2008 at 9:20 AM in Bamboozling, Barack Obama, Campaigns & Campaign Financing, Current Affairs, Hillary Clinton, John McCain
I know there have been some comments posted wondering at the direction of NoQuarter, whether or not we are “moving on” and “gently coaxing” our readers to do the same. Well, here is one chick not “moving on,” although I am moving forward.
Certainly, it doesn’t look like we can undo the travesty of this election, so my version of moving forward is to honestly report what happened so it does not happen again. The way to do that is to call those out on the carpet who deserve it. And that includes voters who haven’t been paying attention.
The title issue is much bigger than who got elected. It is about the way this election transpired and what it says about the state of our democracy, our involvement, our knowledge or lack thereof, and the detrimental contributions of a biased press. Most important, it says that money talks and issues, policies and qualifications take a back seat to the almighty dollar and American Idol worship.
I put my country first. I do not want Obama to fail because I do not want our country to fail. As an American citizen, I will respect the office of the President, and if he is indeed inaugurated, I will accord him the same respect I accorded George Bush these past eight years; and you can figure out for yourselves how much or little respect that was. That stated, I will call this man out on the carpet for every trick. I am not done screaming about it.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, right?
It’s our country and it ain’t free. Nothing is free. The freedoms people take for granted were earned and I for one, do not want to lose them. No one here spent thousands of hours campaigning, writing, canvassing, calling, donating so that the media could pick our President.
What kind of “change” is this? What kind of “new politics” is it when you can buy the office? Barack Obama buried the competition under an avalanche of money. Period. He told plenty of lies in his advertising and mostly did not get called on them by a fawning and complicit media. The media’s belated mea culpa is as self serving as it is useless. He completely misrepresented McCain’s positions on Social Security and immigration, for example. With Hillary, he misrepresented her health care plan and besmirched her character. He belittled her foreign policy experience as being nothing more than a series of tea parties. Odd, since he has just proudly appointed her his Secretary of State.
All the while, the media said nothing – the advertising dollar was king. It is devastating to think that Obama’s massive spending on these respective networks might also have bought him more positive coverage.
According to Politico:
A close John McCain ally charged on Thursday that Barack Obama had followed Richard Nixon’s 1972 path to victory — drowning his opponent with cash — and asserted Obama was never held to account for breaking a promise to participate in a system that would have limited his campaign’s historic spending.
“If the roles were reversed and it was the Republican Party nominee who had decided to walk away from the system and spend hundreds of millions of dollars more than the Democratic nominee — having a very direct effect on the election — I do not think it would have been taken with as much equanimity by the press and the powers that be as has been the case this year,” said Trevor Potter, a McCain confidant who served as the top lawyer to the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign.
“It was, after all, Richard Nixon doing exactly that — raising an untold amount of money and blowing George McGovern out of the water — that created the public funding system in the first place,” Potter added during a panel discussion of the 2008 presidential campaign.
But Obama’s campaign lawyer Bob Bauer, also on the panel, balked at the Nixon comparison, calling Potter’s analysis “a vast vineyard” of sour grapes.
“I don’t normally think of Richard Nixon when I think of Barack Obama. I don’t normally think of George McGovern when I think of John McCain,” Bauer said, asserting Obama’s enormous financial advantage over McCain was not determinative.
Obama’s final fundraising report, due by midnight Thursday, is expected to show that he raised a record-shattering $750 million or more for his campaign, compared with the $322 million to which McCain’s campaign had access.
Bauer can call it ‘sour grapes,’ but it is unmistakable that a candidate who controls the airwaves with double and triple the media buys, can exaggerate, misrepresent or outright lie about his opponent’s policy and record. Combining that with the media not correcting the record on those misrepresentations; well, that is a formidable one-two punch. Never mind completely demoralizing any opposition voters, urging them to think the outcome was already a foregone conclusion. Never mind the spectre of President Bush in the background.
I am more concerned that Obama did the same thing to Hillary – a far more qualified candidate who was massively outspent and treated to a crap sandwich by the media daily, while Obama’s dissembling, flip-flopping and lack of concrete policy went largely unchecked. This did make a determinative difference.
Not that I wish to give oxygen to Karl Rove, but no matter how evil I think him, he is a brilliant political mind. He had this to say in his editorial in yesterday’s WSJ:
If money talks, we’ll likely soon hear the real reason why Barack Obama beat John McCain. Both men and the national parties will report to the Federal Election Commission today how much money they raised in October and November. And what the numbers will probably show is that Mr. Obama outspent Mr. McCain by the biggest margin in history, perhaps a quarter of a billion dollars.
Rove estimated that the report would show that Obama and the DNC had a total of between $827 million and $847 million in funds for the general election. Why would they need all that is this no-lose year for the Democrats? I mean, if they had such a great candidate and all? Oh yeah, the Bradley effect. Well, clearly, there wasn’t one.
Mr. McCain and the RNC spent $550 million in the general election, including the $84 million in public financing Mr. McCain accepted in exchange for his campaign not raising money after the GOP convention.
He buried Mr. McCain on TV. Nielsen, the audience measurement firm, reports that between June and Election Day, Mr. Obama had a 3-to-2 advantage over Mr. McCain on network TV buys. And Mr. Obama’s edge was likely larger on local cable TV, which Nielsen doesn’t monitor.
A state-by-state analysis confirms the Obama advantage. Mr. Obama outspent Mr. McCain in Indiana nearly 7 to 1, in Virginia by more than 4 to 1, in Ohio by almost 2 to 1 and in North Carolina by nearly 3 to 2. Mr. Obama carried all four states.
Mr. Obama also used his money to outmuscle Mr. McCain on the ground, with more staff, headquarters, mail and a larger get-out-the-vote effort. In mid-September the Obama campaign said its budget for Florida was $39 million. The actual number was probably larger. But in any case, Mr. McCain spent a mere $13.1 million in the state. Mr. Obama won Florida by 2.81 percentage points.
Mr. McCain was outspent by wide margins in every battleground state. But it would have been worse for him if RNC Chairman Mike Duncan and Finance Chairman Elliott Broidy hadn’t stockpiled funds in 2007 and early 2008. The RNC provided nearly half the funds for the GOP’s combined general-election campaign, while the DNC provided less than a tenth of the funds that benefited Mr. Obama.
To diminish criticism, Mr. Obama’s campaign spun the storyline that he was being bankrolled by small donors. Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, calls that a “myth.” CFI found that Mr. Obama raised money the old fashioned way — 74% of his funds came from large donors (those who donated more than $200) and nearly half from people who gave $1,000 or more.
A huge number of President-elect Obama’s supporters still believe he raised all his money on the internet with mostly small donations. Denial, anyone? And how disrespectful to those who actually were small donors — giving their hard earned money so he could blow $6 million of it in one night on his faux Grecian temple extravaganza at Invesco Field. I guess it’s all about shock and awe, right?
Rove goes on to state:
But that’s not the entire story. It’s been reported that the Obama campaign accepted donations from untraceable, pre-paid debit cards used by Daffy Duck, Bart Simpson, Family Guy, King Kong and other questionable characters. If the FEC follows up with a report on this, it should make for interesting reading.
You can wait long for the follow-up, Mr. Rove. So can the rest of us. It’s circle the wagon time and no one is going to embarrass the new President-elect; certainly not the FEC.
Mr. Obama’s victory marks the death of the campaign finance system. When it was created after Watergate in 1974, the campaign finance system had two goals: reduce the influence of money in politics and level the playing field for candidates.
This year it failed at both. OpenSecrets.org tells us a record $2.4 billion was spent on this presidential election. And with Mr. Obama’s wide financial advantage, it’s clear that money is playing a bigger role than ever and candidates are not competing on equal footing.
The victim of this broken system is one of its principal architects — Mr. McCain. He helped craft the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform along with Sen. Russ Feingold in 2002.
No presidential candidate will ever take public financing in the general election again and risk being outspent as badly as Mr. McCain was this year…
It is time to trust the American people and remove limits on how much an individual can donate to a campaign. By doing that, we can design a system that will be much more open by requiring candidates to frequently report donations in an online database. Technology makes this possible. Such a system would be easier for journalists to use and would therefore make it more likely that fund raising would be included in news coverage. That would give voters the tools they need to determine if a candidate is getting too much from unattractive people.
Well, Mr. Rove, that would only work if people really saw exactly which billionaires or interest groups were contributing money to each campaign – so we see exactly who is pushing to get someone elected. Then voters might take a look to see whether or not they thought that was a good idea.
I still prefer the idea of campaign finance reform – where there is an equal forum and more equal spending. Then we might finally have to look at the issues, not vote for a popular brand.
In closing, Karl Rove offers a truthful assessment of Obama’s monetary juggernaut:
Rather than showing the success of a new style of post-partisan politics, Mr. Obama’s victory may show the enduring truth of the old Chicago Golden Rule: He who has the gold rules.
This campaign made a mockery of campaign finance reform. Do we really want a political system where the louder voice granted by a greater money advantage allows you to shout down your opponent, without regard to the facts? Obama’s supporters keep saying he ran a more effective, shrewder campaign. How shrewd do you have to be to throw almost a billion dollars at the problem?
If, as he put it, his only “executive experience” is running his campaign, that does not bode well for America’s finances during this very troubled time in our economy. If that is his “shrewd” method of problem solving, I’ll take a pass, thanks.
We have an obligation as American citizens to keep the elective process honest, even if politicians will not. I am very proud that I have the right to vote. That is a privilege not afforded everywhere in this world. I want my vote to mean something. I want our politicians held accountable.
I find it horribly disturbing that Obama is congratulated and applauded for the outrageous amount of money he raised in this campaign while people turn a blind eye at the ramifications of this accomplishment. Especially when the FEC refuses to check into the questionable internet donations he received. What has happened to one person, one vote?
How accountable will any of our politicians be when money is all that matters? How accountable are they now? Not very. Rather than “move on,” I say move forward and make as much noise as humanly possible to our elected officials – this kind of “campaigning” cannot be tolerated. How many elections do we want to have taken out of our hands? If we laud those who raise a bushel basket of funds, but decline to oust them when they renege on their promises to the American electorate, then we have no one to blame but ourselves when they tell us to “go off and play” while they run our country into the ground.
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