By Adam Bitely — You can set your watch by the media stories that always come out in each election bemoaning the amount of money that is spent by campaigns. It’s always the same, no matter the changes in laws that seem to happen rather routinely. There is always too much money being spent and serious reforms to limit that money would make elections more palatable, the media elites claim.
But is this so? Is there really too much money being spent to win elected office?
Consider the election for the presidency. If one becomes President, they immediately are perceived to be the most powerful man in the world. The winner becomes the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces and can deploy the military wherever they please — whether or not that is spelled out in the Constitution is another debate — but nonetheless, the winner controls the world’s most powerful military force. The winner also gets to veto any legislation they want from Congress and has the potential to change the landscape of the Supreme Court. And you also get to live in the White House.
All of the above and many more powers and perks can be yours for a price of about $1 billion and enough support from the electorate. And the $1 billion comes from donors, not all of it is from your own bank account!
If you ask me, that seems like a remarkable deal!
Consider what companies spend to run a successful marketing campaign. When McDonald’s launches a new product, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to get people in the store to purchase the latest McSandwich. When Microsoft rolls out their latest products, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure you upgrade your computer. And who even knows the price tag for running a successful marketing campaign for Coca-Cola.
But when it comes to becoming the most powerful man in the world, we are supposed to believe that money should not be a factor in attaining the power of the presidency?
There are many people out there that cling to a romantic belief that candidates for government offices need to be completely disconnected from special interest groups or corporations solely being a person of the people if you will. This stems from another romantic notion that politicians need to be selfless beyond any stretch of the imagination and only act in the best interest of the nation as a whole and never in the interest of a particular sector of people, such as politicians routinely do. Just pay attention to which segments of the electorate receive the most benefits from government and then compare that with the voting behaviors of this group and you can see for yourself that these romantic notions of how government should work are based on fiction, completely detached from the reality of how government and campaigns work.
The fear of special interests destroying elections or corporations buying candidates is quite overblown.
Just consider a single person making a donation to the candidate of their choice. Are they weighing the costs and effects that this candidates policies might have on each citizen of the nation when they make that donation? Not likely. They make donations to candidates that they believe will act in their own best interest. So each person that makes a donation, whether it be for $1 or for many thousands of dollars, is acting in their own self-interest by sending money to the candidate that they want to win.
And now that Super PAC’s have become the latest boogeyman on the campaign trail the rhetoric of too much being spent on elections is in overdrive. With yesterday’s financial disclosure reports from Super PAC’s coming public, the media was in a tizzy to report on what is supposedly absurd amounts of money being spent to market a person to be elevated — solely on receiving the most votes in the electoral college — to be the most politically powerful person in the world. And as I said earlier, compared to marketing of most other products, becoming President is one of the cheaper endeavors.
I suspect that time could be better spent by those who stay up at night worrying that campaign finance is out of control researching the effects of transferring wealth from one group to another group and correlating the increase in votes that politicians then receive to remain in office. That seems to be where the real corruption is.
Adam Bitely is the Editor-in-Chief of NetRightDaily.com. You can follow Adam on Twitter at @AdamBitely.
