CAMPAIGN SPENDING: A PERSONAL STORY

I went to the poll yesterday to cast my early vote. It was actually an exercise in futility since I live in a House district which has been solidly Republican for years. At the state level we are electing a governor and the polls show a double digit lead for the Republican. The current governor is a Democrat but his good standing with the voters apparently isn't transferable in this basically red state. So about the only return on my going out in the rain to vote was that I have exercised my responsibility as a citizen and thereby contributed to saving our democratic system. But there was no sense of political efficacy as touted in political science textbooks; no feeling that my vote can make a difference.

As I drove into the polling place, I expected to see some jumpers and screamers dressed in Paul Revere or Statue of Liberty costumes, but maybe they won't show up until the official election day. There were many, many signs, mostly for local candidates for mayor and council. The most stand out sign was actually a small, nonpartisan black and white one that said, "VOTE THE INCUMBENTS OUT." While waiting in the voting line I did overhear a bit of a conversation between two men about making their choice for the vacant House seat. One said he didn't know much about the candidates, but that didn't seem to matter. "I just want to get rid of Pelosi." The other agreed.

Acquiring political information about candidates and policy issues requires a personal investment of time and effort, even if it only means reading the daily newspaper on a reasonably regular basis. That's a minimum investment. At the local level, don't expect much information via television where political information comes mostly and often negatively from a candidate's paid advertising. The most used term by both sides in this election seems to be "extreme" -- "extreme right" or "extreme liberal". I have used "extreme right" myself in a number of posts.

Turning to another aspect of these elections, and something that led me to a personal recall, is campaign spending. Much has been written and said about the obscene amounts of money that have been pouring into this year's elections. On one side the focus has been on the huge sums being given by unidentified sources to organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads in which Karl Rove is heavily involved. In turn, the GOP side points to the big money being spent by labor unions to support their candidates either directly or through get-out-the-vote drives. In discussion of campaign spending there has also been considerable talk about the huge amounts some candidates are spending to get themselves elected. The leader in this area seems to be Meg Whitman, Republican, who has spent $140 million of her own money in an effort to get elected governor of California. And in just one House district in Minnesota, Michelle Bachman, founder of the Tea Party caucus in the U.S. House, has a war chest of over $5 million for her campaign. This "big money" issue brings me to my own experience with big bucks and campaign spending.

I cast my first vote in the l956 presidential election when President Eisenhower was seeking his second term, challenged for the second time by former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson. I lived in a city of about 60,000 people in southeast Pennsylvania. The city was solidly Republican and I lived in an equally Republican ward. At the time I was a college student in Washington, D.C.

I didn't know much about campaign financing at the time but the part I was familiar with was that election spending included giving cash directly to the voter as he or she exited the polling place. Ward leaders from both parties knew or thought they knew who their supporters were. So when you got about 25 or 30 feet away from the actual polling booth, there was a Democratic ward leader on one side of the hall, a Republican on the other. As you passed by one or the other, being careful to stay on the proper partisan side, you were surreptitiously slipped some cash. At the time, at least in our ward, the going rate was $3 per voter. Because my ward leader knew I had to drive up from Washington to vote, I was given $5. Now if a $2 difference seems kind of cheap for driving so far, remember I was a college student and $5 was a fair amount of money to a student in l956. Besides, gasoline at that time cost only about 25 cents a gallon and if there was a price war, which occurred frequently, the price would be about 19 cents. So that was my first exposure to campaign spending (and receiving).

So, while having a sense of a wasted vote yesterday, I did have a compensating warm feeling in recalling the time when as the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill once said, "All politics is local." I didn't view my l956 vote as a choice between saving or dooming the Republic, I was in it for the big bucks.