The Cheap Seats
Deborah Venable
12/24/07
Isn’t
this fun sitting in the stands and watching a race that started over a year ago
and still has almost another year to run?
The runners aren’t the ones getting tired I’m afraid. Cheerleaders on the sidelines have their
hands full keeping up the interest, but they are very well paid for their
efforts.
If
we try to get a really good look at the runners, the cheerleaders all too often
obstruct our view - which is what they are supposed to do after all. Our attention is diverted from the action of
the runners to the entertaining display put on by those who cheer them on. Before we know it, the race is over and we
hardly know who was still in it!
Campaigning
for political office – any political office, but especially the presidency – is
so hyped and so expensive it isn’t any wonder why we seldom get the quality
representation that we need. You have
to really want the job to withstand the campaign – that’s for sure. The price tag alone is exclusive for all but
the very wealthy, or at least very popular and well connected to wealth. Early estimates indicate a need for $400
million per candidate this time out.
Abraham Lincoln spent about $100,000 to get elected. A century later, the cost to JFK was just
under $10 million. Now we are looking
at a cost per candidate of too close to a half billion dollars! That doesn’t even count the personal cost
not in dollars – yes, you really have to want it!
So
where does all that money go?
The
single largest expenditure for any political candidate is media cost. Well over half of what a campaign spends
goes to buy media time in one form or another.
That doesn’t really surprise any of us does it? Those cheerleaders ARE very well paid for their
efforts!
We
could say that the media wins and loses elections for the candidates depending
on how much positive, negative, or lack of exposure is bestowed on each of
them. But the media does not work for
free. Only a couple of times in the
last eight or ten presidential elections did the loser actually shell out more
for the campaign than the winner. Most
of the time, though, it’s the money that walks and talks.
Some
of the nation’s earlier presidents believed that the presidency was not something
that should be bought and sold, but no one has ever figured out how to get the
price tag removed. Placing the funding
responsibility under a public
financing
plan certainly hasn’t worked too well, and the regulations governing such a
plan are enough to choke a horse. Some
believe that if the public was just better educated toward a willingness to
check that little box on the IRS forms and have some of their confiscated wealth,
(err income taxes) directed toward presidential campaigns everything would be
much more above board.
Throwing
more public money at the problem of campaign financing will not fix it!
Getting
big money out of politics will probably never happen. Political comfort is one of those luxuries that some of the very
wealthy will always try to purchase, and no amount of public funding or
government regulation can stop that.
The uniqueness of the American system is that each individual has the
opportunity to rise to that status of wealth, which would allow us to make such
a purchase if we chose to. We can buy
our season tickets to the race, and even get one of the box seats above the
distractions of the cheerleaders so that we can judge the outcome for ourselves. With enough wealth, we can even pay for a
cheerleader or two. Who knows? We may just like the outcome.
So,
the cost of campaigns will continue to rise – probably in direct relation to
the average American’s declining interest in the race. If everyone were truly attentive after all,
the cheerleaders would not be in such high demand. The price tag on the presidency would be lowered and the quality
of representation would improve. That’s
a theory anyway. I think it is a sound
one. Till then, I guess most of us will
just keep our cheap seats in front of our televisions, radios, computers, and
print publications until the race is over, eh?