The $7 Billion Election (A Few Thoughts)

Well, the final numbers are in, and the 2012 election officially cost a whopping $7 billion. It’s a number that will surely prompt hand-wringing on the left about “getting money out of politics.” This is an issue where I diverge with my liberal fellows; I’m as much of a First Amendment absolutist as they come, and I’d rather answer nasty or inaccurate speech with more speech than with more regulations and contribution limits. I’m all for transparency — more disclosure is absolutely essential, and while money doesn’t necessarily corrupt politics, dark money is another story — but the grand totals don’t really phase me. Like it or not, in the modern age, money is speech. (Just try to get your message out to 250 million Americans by standing on a soapbox in the town square . . . . I guarantee you’ll go running to the major networks in under a minute.)

If citizens don’t like what the onslaught of campaign advertising and ground-game efforts produce, they can leverage the ultimate recourse: voting. We all have brains and choices, and no amount of money can tell a person how to vote. Instead of blaming non-stop TV ads for brainwashing my fellow Americans, I’d rather blame the perfectly able thinkers who let themselves be brainwashed. For what it’s worth, calculations by the Post’s Wonkblog show that, despite the 2012 infusion of cash, advertising was less influential than in 2008, producing an increase of only 0.14% in the votes taken by a candidate with an 1000-ad advantage, versus .60 percentage points in 2008. (And really, a TV ad can’t make you pull the lever in the voting booth.) On that note, it’s worth examining what $7 billion really represents in the long run. Is $7 billion is too rich a price to pay for engaging in the most crucial aspect of democracy? Not if you ask the folks who spend big on other, far less consequential items. Consider the following figures:

$11 billion: Amount Americans spend per year on bottled water.

$13 billion: Disney’s parks-and-resorts 2011 revenue.

$15 billion: Estimated worth of the Harry Potter brand.

$31 billion: The auto industry’s U.S. annual advertising budget.

$35 billion: Americans’ annual spending on gambling.

$51 billion: What Americans spend on their pets each year.

Political spending itself is often considered a form of gambling — surely Sheldon Adelson was wagering on a Romney presidency when he dropped $150 million on the election — but slot machines and scratch-its cost the country five times more than the 2012 race. (Adelson is, as it happens, wonderful proof that money can’t buy votes or guarantee elections.) If given the choice between political activism and 50 billion bottles of Aquafina or Poland Spring, I’ll take the hustle for the White House any day.

More Lies (NYT, you’re breaking my heart)

Twice in as many days, the New York Times has made assertions that it almost certainly knows are false. In both cases, there is ample evidence that the newspaper has access to the correct facts, yet deliberately chooses to obscure them. And in both cases, the misstatements — actually, we might as well just call them “lies” — reinforce the conservative stereotype of the Times as a liberal paper that injects ideology into its news articles. I would usually be the first to defend the Times against charges of bias, as nine out of ten articles are written with studied objectivity, but the last two days have been disappointing.

First, as I complained in a previous post, the Times has continued its practice of referring to Mitt Romney’s 15% tax rate as higher than the effective rate of a middle-income earner. Now, the paper again makes a claim that has been pointed out as a fallacy. In an article describing the Adelson family’s multi-million-dollar donations to Winning Our Future, a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, reporter Nicholas Confessore mischaracterizes the Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment permits corporations and unions to make unlimited donations to independent political committees. While Citizens United certainly changed campaign finance rules, it played no role in the Adelsons’ ability to donate $10 million to Winning Our Future. The $5,000 limit on private citizens’ donations to PACs was lifted by a federal appeals court ruling, SpeechNow.org vs. FEC. That decision indeed drew on Citizens United, but even prior to the SpeechNow ruling, wealthy individuals hoping to influence politics had a smorgasboard of options.

Anyone with a spare $10 million could give unlimited amounts to “issue-oriented” 527 groups, named for the section of the tax code that regulates them, as early as the 2004 election. Though technically prohibited from endorsing or criticizing a specific candidate, these organizations predictably blurred the line between “issues advocacy” and advocacy on behalf of a candidate. After all, if you can air an ad calling pro-choice politicians baby-killers, and the only pro-choicer in the race is the Democrat . . . . why bother naming names? Certain charities — 501(c)(4)s — could also accept unlimited (and anonymous) donations prior to Citizens United, as long as their “primary purpose” was not political. The Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, as well as Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, which were tossing around millions long before super PACs arrived on the scene, walked right up to the 49% “political” limit in 2010.

Deep-pocketed donors have had a hand on the scales of democracy since before I was born. Yet the Times writes: “The Adelsons’ contributions on Mr. Gingrich’s behalf illustrate how rapidly a new era of unlimited political money is reshaping the rules of presidential politics and empowering individual donors to a degree unseen since before the Watergate scandals.”A paragraph later, the paper explains the ramifications of “the emergence of new campaign finance rules in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling”:

That decision paved the way for super PACs, including the kind that have spent more than $30 million in the Republican primary so far: political committees run by each candidate’s former aides and financed by a few wealthy supporters. Because they are technically independent of the candidate, the groups can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, rendering less relevant the limits that Congress imposed in the 1970s on contributions to candidates . . . . But critics warn that the new rules have reopened avenues for the very wealthy to exert undue influence over campaigns and candidates.

Citizens United indeed reopened avenues for corporations and unions to exert such influence, but the decision said nothing about wealthy individuals like the Adelsons. Is it really that tough for the Times to cite the correct court case? Also unsupported is the implication that corporate donations have been a game-changer in this election cycle. Because many super PACs have altered their disclosure schedules to allow them to delay publishing their donor lists until January 31, there is no way of knowing whether big businesses are behind the recent spending. Are corporations and unions really financing slimy attack ads, or are the bulk of the super PAC funds coming from individuals? Considering the general level of nastiness, I’ll be curious to see if any big-name corporations indeed donated to Winning Our Future and its ilk. When Target gave money to a politician who opposed gay marriage, an Internet backlash ensued. Will corporations really put their cash behind movies like “When Bain Came to Town,” the anti-Romney production that skewered capitalism?

What really gets me, however, is that the Times knows exactly what Citizens United did and did not allow. On Jan. 16, it published a letter to the editor from a lawyer involved in Citizens United that pointed out the very inaccuracies Confessore repeats in his Jan. 23 article. The lawyer, Floyd Abrams, cites two articles that blame Citizens United for enabling “a wealthy individual to influence an election.” In any other context, I would probably loathe Abrams, who works for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But I happen to agree with him on the First Amendment. Free speech isn’t always pretty or polite, but it’s the bedrock of the Constitution — and like it or not, in today’s world, speech without funding is so quiet as to be meaningless. Abrams makes a valid point, and does so in fewer words than I have spent haranguing the Times:

The Citizens United case does not deal with “wealthy individuals” at all . . . . The Citizens United case dealt with a different subject — the rights of corporations and unions to participate fully in the political process.

Abrams concludes that “Citizens United’s defense of First Amendment values remains highly controversial, but it is important to bear in mind precisely what it is about.”

Amen.