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Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Fund raising, MN GOP style
I'm sure this kind of 'tacky' quid pro quo goes on all the time, but the press doesn't typically cover it. We're paying attention to lobbyists for the time being, so the Minnesota GOP should probably not be so explicit about tying fund raising to specific issues.
Or -- and not just to be contrarian -- our political parties should be FAR MORE explicit about these issues. The political fiction we live with is gruesome, but we should stop being so squeamish about it. A check for $1000 is not speech. It's payment for services rendered or services to be rendered. The only reason anyone donates any money to any candidate is to influence their vote.
The most important issue to any politician is getting re-elected. Elections cost money, so politicians take checks from just about anyone in order to help them win elections. There are some issues that politicians genuinely care about, in some cases passionately. In rare cases, politicians care more about an issue than winning elections.
For the most part, though, voters and politicians have at most a handful of issues that genuinely matter to them. Abortion. War. Environment. Terrorism. Tax cuts. Below these above-the-fold issues lobbyists get to play. Nobody ran for Congress with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in their platform, so it's easy to take the money and run to the chamber and cast an "aye".
It comes to this. A politicians adopts the principles necessary to win an election then takes money from everyone willing to support those principles -- or who has interests outside the ken of the electorate. Campaign. Rinse. Repeat.
It's a lousy system producing consistently lousy results. A little more honesty would help. We should start by asking politicians to stop pretending that a $1000 check from a single-issue advocacy group doesn't affect how they vote.
