By Jerry D. Rose
I recently had an exchange of views with a person who had read some of my pieces on “taking politicians out the money” just as the U.S. is failing so miserably in “taking the money out of politics.” The person expressed skepticism, stating that this is “counter-intuitive,” like “going to war without weapons.”
My response I will repeat here. It has to do with the power of the weak, as they are able to convert the power of their adversaries—be it the power of money or of military weapons—into actual liabilities in their struggle to maintain dominance. It was counter-intuitive (against all common sense) as well, I said, that Gandhi and the Indian National Congress would be able to prevail against the military might of the British Empire; that Mandela and the African National Congress could force the dismantling of the apartheid regime in South Africa; that Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement could overcome much of the racial discrimination in America. Yet in each of these and other mass movements, these forces have borrowed from the Biblical injunction to “put on the armour of light,” as weak adversaries have overcome much stronger ones, making resistance to their movements more costly to power elites than the marginal pain of yielding to them.
In the same way, it is possible for populist campaigners to convert their limited campaign budgets into vote-getting assets. In my own congressional district, an independent candidate has an opportunity to make a campaign liability of his Republican opponent’s having amassed a $2.5 million campaign war chest over his 21 years in Congress. The independent has only to call a spade a spade, pointing out that contributors are obviously not laying out their money to help the congressman get re-elected—he has money a-plenty for that purpose. Rather they are contributing to win the “favor” of the incumbent in his votes in Congress in return for the “favor” of paying into a fund that insures the congressman’s financial security when he retires. That spade is called CORRUPTION, and it should be so labeled; no matter the reluctance of candidates to “go negative” in a campaign.
Any populist campaign should, in my opinion, have a campaign researcher go to the online records of its opponent’s campaign collections and expenditures over the current and previous campaigns. This information is available with a minimum of research “digging” in records maintained by state and local divisions of elections, as well as the Federal Elections Commission. This should be an integral part of any campaign of any candidate who faces a much more heavily financed opponent.
As a concluding thought on this topic, I’ll return to a semblance of sanity by noting that populist campaigners cannot literally go to “war” (a campaign) without “weapons” (money).
In the movie Gandhi, a member of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, was being interviewed by a woman reporter, and he told her that one of the group’s biggest problems was raising money to carry on Gandhi’s protests. Given that the leader’s main protests consisted in hunger strikes, the reporter wondered why that should cost so much money. To which Nehru replied: “My dear, you have no idea how much it costs us to keep Gandhi in poverty!”
And yes, it will cost a great deal of money for populist campaigners to get out the word of their own poverty as contrasted to their opponents luxuriating in the lap of extravagant funding. So no populist campaign can avoid the problem of fund-raising. But such campaigns can exercise the discipline of sharply reduced limits on amounts they will accept from any one donor, and of finding the cheapest available way of accomplishing essential campaign tasks, including the garnering of “earned (unpaid) media” by making news of their unusual financial practices. In these ways it should be possible to reduce the amount of the “great deal” of funding necessary to maintain a campaign in a news-worthy level of poverty.
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