Traditionally, most campaign spending is done after the opposing political parties hold their national conventions. That is when the campaign season really gets serious and the voters start paying attention. But this year is different. The campaign spending has already reached the spending level of the 2008 campaign, and neither party has held its convention yet.
According to NBC News, this week alone the campaign spending is about $37 million dollars -- bringing the total spending for this year to about $512 million. That's a huge amount, but there's little doubt that it will be dwarfed by after-convention spending. The spending this year won't just set a new record -- it will stomp all over the old record.
The most troubling part is that a huge portion of the spending so far (about 46.48%) was not done by the campaigns themselves -- but by super-PACs and similar groups. Their spending has been about $238 million, and they are still raking in the cash for future spending (much of it from anonymous donors). And $9 out of every $10 dollars spent by these groups has been for either pro-Romney or anti-Obama ads. The secret big-money donors want to see Romney elected (probably because they want to see even more tax breaks for rich people like themselves).
This is the result of the terrible Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC. This decision must be overturned, before it turns this country into a plutocracy (rule by the rich) instead of a democracy (rule by all of the people).
We could render the "Citizens United" ruling uterrly irrelevant, and make the campaign spending completely useless, by simply not allowing our votes to be determined by sound bite advertisements that we see while watching sitcoms on television. The problem is not that the 1% is spending the money, it's that the 99% are voting the way that the 1% tells them to.
ReplyDeleteAll we have to do is vote, in the primary elections, for the newer candidates who the moneyed are not producing ads for. Or organize write in candidacies. Or vote for third parties.
As long as it keeps working they will keep doing it, and it is working because we are voting for whoever has the most ads, whoever has spent the most money. We are standing in the open without an umbrella, shaking our fists at the rain.