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 Posted January 24th, 2010 at 1:59PM
Thursday’s decision, in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, “is going to flip the existing campaign order on its head,” said Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican campaign lawyer at the law-and-lobbying firm Patton Boggs who has represented both candidates and outside groups, including Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group formed to oppose Senator John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.
“It will put on steroids the trend that outside groups are increasingly dominating campaigns,” Mr. Ginsberg said.
Great, so expect this court decision to spur an even greater emphasis on dollars spent each election cycle, becoming ever larger the biggest determining factor in sorting winners from losers. It was always my interpretation that the bill of rights spoke for the rights of the US citizen, not institutions of any stripe. Obviously the Supreme Court has set off on a different understanding while attempting to cohere various first amendment rulings. Unfortunately the divergent result is to limit the individuals’ voice during the democratic process. From the NY Times op-ed -
The [Supreme Court] majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.
The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.
McCain for his part has called campaign finance reform “dead” and the majority ruling in the Supreme Court “naive.” It seems like Obama, being the constitutional law scholar he is, could chart the course toward renewed campaign finance reform, viewed constitutionally legal by this conservatively activist Court. It seems like the only hope for rational government down the line.
If payola and the exchange of money is granted a verifiable constitutional guarantee, where does that leave us? If freedom of expression extends to corporations buying elections, will it similarly extend to the individual looking to purchase crack cocaine or solicit prostitutes?
Posted November 2nd, 2008 at 12:25PM
So the other day I received a political flyer in the mail, not from Obama, McGaughey, or Gillibrand, but Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, the Green Party’s Prez / Veep candidates. I’m registered Green and one of only a half dozen (at most!) in my entire district, so I’m just surprised they found my name in the voter logs.
This got me to thinking. In 2000, I was underage, but supported the Greens (that time, Ralph Nader). Four years ago I begrudgingly voted for Kerry because I felt a large popular vote against Bush was needed to repudiate his first reign of terror. This year, I haven’t given any third party option a second thought after supporting Obama through the extended primaries. What’s changed?
Eight years ago, Nader had a good spiel against voting for “the lesser of two evils.” But history has proven stark differences between the two major political parties. Is there anyone who’ll argue that we’d have seen the same slash and burning of environmental legislation under a President Gore as we have under Bush? And Al Gore wouldn’t have stacked the executive branch with card-carrying PNAC members. The occupation of Iraq wouldn’t have been the priority it was. To trivialize all differences between Obama and McCain, Democrat and Republican, is facile, immature.
Certainly, I don’t believe in a great bulk of the Democratic platform, today or eight years ago. Obama is hawkish on Iran, Afghanistan, Israel. Economically he promises the whole pie, or two or three, without disclosing a single item he’ll use his metaphorical scalpel on. Some of this is political necessity, some of it, his actual politics.
Even though I might not agree with Obama on all the issues, I’ll vote for him, on the Working Families party line. The Greens have for the past few elections been encouraging people living in safe states to vote for them. Get 5% of the vote, and you’re eligible for federal funding the next cycle. But federal funding would not change the fundamentals of our electoral system, which needs significant reform before third parties become viable. And a vote for an independent candidate (as Nader runs today) actually encourages the status quo – character-based politics, the sort of ass-backwardness that got Schwarzenegger elected governor.
Meanwhile, Obama holds some promise as president, with the alternative far more frightening. Framing the debate in a way that results in a choice between the “lesser of two evils” is to turn the election into a moral debate. And I’m uninterested in using elections as my own little referendums on morality.
McCain isn’t the evil choice; he’s the stupid choice. Things aren’t black and white, right and wrong. Life is shades of grey, and Obama comes out a shader (or three) better than McCain.
Posted October 29th, 2008 at 1:17PM
Will undecided voters move toward McCain come election day? Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight doesn’t think so -
The Undecideds
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A somewhat higher proportion of whites (and Latinos) are uncommitted, but the differences are not overwhelming.
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Another problem is that we haven’t been distinguishing undecided voters from third-party voters. There is an argument that third-party voters should be treated as quasi-undecided voters, since third party support tends to collapse at the voting booth. Nevertheless, Bob Barr and Ralph Nader will probably pick up a collective 1-2 percent of the electorate, and third party support tends to be overwhelmingly concentrated among white voters.
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Long story short … given optimistic assumptions (McCain wins 2/3 of white undecideds, 100 percent of third-party support collapses), the undecided vote is worth a net of about a point for McCain. Given what I’d consider to be more neutral assumptions, there’s no particular reason to think that the undecided vote favors him.
My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between and that this is worth, say, half a point for McCain. Even give him the full point if you like. This effect is probably smaller than that of the cellphone problem, from which there may be 1-2 points of cushion in Obama’s direction. If on top of that the polls are being overly conservative with their likely voter modeling, the numbers are more likely to be underestimating Obama’s standing than overestimating it.
It also should be noted that people still undecided at this point are more likely to simply skip voting altogether, further reducing any advantage for McCain. A sudden upset is looking less and less likely.
Posted October 29th, 2008 at 1:04PM
From FiveThirtyEight.com: McCain Miami Rally, Getting Ugly Down Here
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After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that’s what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum…
The event maybe lasted a minute, two at the most, before police competently managed to hustle the two away from the scene and out of the danger zone. Only FiveThirtyEight tracked the two men down for comment, a quarter mile down the street.
“People were screaming ‘Terrorist!’ ‘Communist!’ ‘Socialist!’” Sorando said when we caught up with him. “I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me.”
Asked what had precipitated the event, “We were just chanting ‘Obama!’ and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy.”
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The two Obama supporters had attempted to attend the event with tickets printed from the McCain website. Both were clad in Obama T-shirts, Sorando in a blue “Obama ‘08″ shirt, and Garcia in a white “Obama-Biden” shirt. They were told that the event was being held on private property and that wearing the shirts or carrying the signs they would be asked to either remove the shirts or not attend.
For an hour during the rally, the two had stood across the street from the lumberyard on public property holding yard signs. Some drivers honked in support, and others honked in disapproval. When the rally ended and the crowd spilled out, the disturbance began.
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Not thirty seconds later, John McCain drove by in his SUV and waved at Garcia on the sidewalk, who was happily waving his Obama sign.
I’m not a fan of McCain, but his apparent supporters are downright scary. 
Posted October 19th, 2008 at 10:05PM
So have you seen this latest Obama ad? The one that starts out with a clip of McCain at the 3rd debate saying “I’m not President Bush”? And then the voiceover goes “Truuueee, but..”?
I absolutely love this ad. I dunno how effective it is, no judgement there. But the voiceover guy is genius in taking McCain’s over the top scornful tone (of late) and reversing the tables.
Admittedly, I’ve been pretty negative toward McCain, and lest anyone think I despise the guy…
Eight years ago he ran a pretty clean campaign in the Republican primaries. Got creamed by Rove’s tactics, but also by his rather moderate, nonpartisan record. Over the course of Bush’s presidency, however, McCain has transparently attempted to re-align himself with the conservative base. And this backfired. (Looks like the last time Bush cracked into the measly 40% approval rating range was 2006!) McCain has also run a repugnantly Rovian campaign this year. (No wonder.) And so I lose respect for the guy.
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A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
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Can you blame me?
Posted September 27th, 2008 at 11:44AM
So it’s been a crazy week for presidential politics. McCain continues his dysfunctional campaign and Congress continues to work on a bailout. I’ve been away from the internet for the past week, but have had access to cable. So I watched the cable news shows and discovered that their explicit editorializing was a nice change of pace. (To contrast, last night I watched the presidential debate at home, limited to the major networks, and all I got were platitudes of how both candidates performed “well.”)
I won’t bother to retroactively post responses to events like Palin’s third disastrous interview or McCain’s farcical “suspension” of his campaign. Anyone unaware of the news still won’t be interested, and anyone keeping track is already informed.
Let’s go back to staring at the polls. We should see the first debate changing things in these coming days. And then it’s the VP debate(!)
Posted September 9th, 2008 at 10:49AM
This is the sort of editorial I would write if I had more than fiften minutes to spend on this blog each day. I think Paul Begala makes some pretty salient points, regardless of whether you agree with his overall prognosis. Strip away the editorializing, and this is probably how the election will shape up.
What to expect from McCain, Obama in 56 days
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The party of Reagan — sunny optimism, criticism offered in folksy witticisms and the shake of a head — is gone. This is the party of Giuliani and Palin: sarcastic, sneering, snotty and snide. I don’t know why, but meanness plays with the GOP base.
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So McCain is not going to make this a race about ideas. After all, he actually has voted with Bush 91 percent of the time. Perhaps that’s why his campaign manager said this election was not about issues. McCain plainly wants this race to be about biography. His is actually the campaign built around a cult of personality.
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The flip side of a character-based positive message is — you guessed it — a character-based negative campaign. I hate to say this, but the McCain campaign — and its right-wing allies — are going to play the politics of fear and smear.
You saw it in St. Paul: doughy Republicans scoffing at Barack Obama’s time as a community organizer — even though Obama’s work was the embodiment of the values the GOP claims to believe in: faith-based, family-centered, self-help, hands-on, non-bureaucratic.
If you thought you’d seen it all with Willie Horton, the vicious attacks on Bill Clinton and his family (including John McCain himself cruelly mocking the appearance of then-12 year-old Chelsea), or the “swift-boating” of John Kerry, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Obama’s been maligned from the right as a Muslim, an elitist, a socialist — and that’s just the warm-up act.
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For his part, Barack Obama needs to drill two numbers into the heads of every American: 91 and 134. 91 is the percentage of the time McCain has voted with Bush, and 134 is the number of corporate special interest lobbyists involved in the McCain campaign.
Obama will likely argue that no one who votes with Bush 91 percent of the time is a maverick, and that someone with 134 former or current lobbyists advising, funding or managing his campaign cannot be considered a reformer. If Obama can shatter the image of the maverick reformer, even McCain’s heroic POW story will not be enough to win the White House.
On the positive side, Obama will likely stress the economy, including his plan to cut taxes for middle-class families and small business, as well as his plan for energy independence. The key to success will be connecting with voters.
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