Shortly thereafter came the burst of euphoria about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chances, if she decides to run, in the coming New York Senate campaign, her potential for scaring off and/or wiping out any primary competition and of prevailing against Mayor Giuliani in the general election as well. Like Vice President Gore, the First Lady has both some big liabilities and some formidable assets as a candidate. But whenever I have heard either of their candidacies being discussed in recent weeks, neither their potential strengths nor weaknesses as holders of the offices they may run for has been the primary consideration. Such concerns come in about fifth. The first qualification cited is their awesome ability to raise money. It would render Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy invincible in a face-off with other contenders, one is told, and ditto Vice President Gore.
This is something relatively new in its extremity. I don’t mean that campaign concern to the point of obsession with raising money is new. That’s been around forever. I mean the oil-spill-like seeping out of the money mania until it reaches a dimension that engulfs all else, renders all else secondary–a kind of busted tanker or Torrey Canyon effect. There are a lot of explanations for this. Defenders of the “reformed” fund-raising order, created in the aftermath of Watergate, will point out, in the course of arguing, how shamelessly crooked things were in the old days. This is true, and it is also true that a few things are cleaner now. But by and large, the party functionaries and legislators who undertook the revisions of fund-raising practice made a total hash of it. And then, as if that weren’t enough, they began working earnestly to figure out ways to game their own handiwork, to take advantage of the defective system they had created and, as needed, to add a few more defects that could be exploited year by year.
The system never was pretty. But it has become a lot less so in recent years. You almost never hear of a candidate’s being selected because of positions anymore. Descriptions of the prospective president’s or senator’s or representative’s or governor’s leanings, ideas and record tend to be sketchy and vague. The candidate is “a moderate.” The candidate is a devotee of the “middle way.” But these are definitions that leave out everything of substance, in the hope of producing an irresistible, one-size-fits-all candidacy. And in addition to the candidate’s ability to raise money, you hear a great deal about what the candidate’s polls show. With luck you will have got yourself a prodigious fund-provider (either the candidate’s own money or that of lavish contributors) and a sure winner. The rest will take care of itself. Because these two indispensable qualities come most reliably with celebrities and very, very rich people, you will likely end up with more of both as officeholders, as is already happening.
I don’t have anything against very, very rich people or celebrities, but I do have something against the way they are being routinely used by both Republicans and Democrats to rig our politics. And the same goes for what is innocently known as “spin.” The reason it is felt necessary to raise so much political money a couple of years before an election or convention or primary is that this much time is required to buy the professional spin and let the spinners do their work and let their fabricated message sink in. It takes this much time to achieve the parroting outcome–in which millions of people are suddenly saying more or less the same thing at the same time and honestly believing it to be an original thought of their own. A new reality will have been created. It will be almost impossible to break through or challenge as to facts, or even to work around.
Now these, I admit with embarrassment, are pretty paranoid thoughts. But I do think we have let ourselves get boxed into a political order that does less and less for people, that rewards the greediest and pettiest of the politicians’ instincts and invariably seeks to punish the ones who try to take an independent stand or think for themselves or otherwise fight back. The obscene amounts of campaign funds sloshing through the nation’s political arteries have not seemed to trouble people very much. What do those that provided the funds want? What did they get, and who gave it to them? How much of these transactions was camouflaged? More paranoia, I suppose.
But if there are good answers to the questions, shouldn’t we have them? The only question that doesn’t need answering, as far as I can see, is this: What does the candidate intend to do if elected with the help of all this money? That’s easy–on day one of the new term, start raising more money for the next campaign.
