Money, Politics, And The Public Trust

When a state’s efforts to rid itself of a reputation for corruption run headlong into entrenched interests accustomed to controlling the flow of money and hence visibility and viability in election campaigns, you get the kind of spectacle we had in Connecticut this week: a multimillionaire candidate for governor in court trying to squeeze off the supply of public money to a less well-heeled rival in next month’s primary. Here it is, just two and a half weeks before an important primary to determine the standard bearers for both the Republican and Democratic tickets in November’s statewide elections, and the main point of contention centers not on how to address looming state deficits, disappearing job opportunities, and a discouraging statewide economic outlook, but on how much money candidates should have to spend promoting themselves for election.

Connecticut’s Citizens’ Election Program, created in 2005 in response to the corruption of the disgraced Rowland administration, has itself run afoul of the law. Last year, a US District Court judge struck down parts of the program as unconstitutional, and subsequent rulings in the Second Circuit US Court of Appeals left the law severely weakened and rife with lingering legal questions, which set the stage for this week’s fresh round of legal wrangling.

With Democrats and Republicans both fielding multimillionaire candidates who face cash-strapped primary opponents, the court battles might seem momentous until we remember what it is all about: who gets to have the most television ads. That is where the bulk of campaign financing is spent, and that is the advantage that monied candidates so desperately want to preserve. Millions are poured into their production and broadcast, and for some political insiders, their sheer quantity is evidence of a candidate’s success. Never mind that their content is insipid, uninformative, deliberately misleading, and emotionally manipulative, they actually sway elections. Sadly, these ridiculous political cartoons have become the centerpieces of modern electioneering.

We, as voters, are partly to blame for that. Our culture has taught us to relate to a complicated world through the icons of name brands, or celebrity, or red/blue ideology, or simply though the icons on our cellphones. When time is tight, such facility trumps complexity and provides us with easy responses to tough questions — easy, that is, until complex consequences intrude.

Everyone likes a winner, especially if the benefits of a candidate’s winning ways are eventually conferred on all citizens through competence and good government. So we expect campaigns to be hard-fought, we expect every advantage to be plied, and we expect every candidate exude self-confidence. How someone runs a campaign speaks volumes about how he or she might run a state — but only to those who are discerning, who take the time to learn about issues from sources other than political advertising, and who make it clear to every candidate who will listen that our votes are not merely a commodity for them to purchase but a trust for them to earn.