?I will be the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign,? Barack Obama predicted in an e-mail sent to supporters on June 26th, urging potential donors to pony up before the end of the month. Yesterday, the Obama campaign announced that it had raised seventy-one million dollars in June, thirty-five million dollars less than the Romney campaign?s hundred and six million. The saddest part of this news isn?t that the Obama campaign is likely to be outspent; it?s that the Obama campaign has no position on the problem of money in elections.
The campaign?s line??do the math??is that Romney donors write big checks while Obama supporters more or less pitch in what coins they can find in the kitchen coffee can. ?Through the primaries, we raised almost three-quarters of our money from donors giving less than $1,000, while Mitt Romney?s campaign raised more than three-quarters of its money from individuals giving $1,000 or more.? It?s a reasonable point, but it sure doesn?t amount to a critique of the idea that whoever can raise the most money wins.
Campaigns used not to cost so much. George Washington ran unopposed; he didn?t spend a shilling. Before Andrew Jackson, no one even campaigned. Elections didn?t get to be pricey until about the middle of the nineteenth century, but, even then, the costs were different and consisted, in the main, of printing ballots with your name on them, and, not infrequently, paying voters to cast them. Before the Civil War, the going rate to buy a vote was between two-fifty and twenty bucks a head?cheap in San Francisco, costly in Connecticut.
That kind of thing adds up. In an investigation published in Harper?s in 1887, a lawyer named William J. Ivins calculated that running for Congress from New York cost more than two hundred thousand dollars. Then, once you got elected, it cost a mint to pay off the people who?d helped get you into office. It was cheapest to just give them jobs?the spoils of victory?a practice begun by Jackson. The party in power, though, could also raise money from its partisans by levying what amounted to a tax on federal officeholders. Political appointees paid an annual tax, called a party assessment (every office holder paid, from a well-compensated New York customs official, whose annual party assessment was twenty-five dollars a year, all the way down to a night watchman, at seven dollars and fifty cents). That practice continued well past the passage of the 1876 Anti-Assessment Act, which made mandatory party assessment illegal, and was only really quashed by the 1882 Supreme Court decision Ex Parte Curtis, which upheld the constitutionality of the Anti-Assessment Act, 8-1, with the lone dissenter, Justice Joseph Bradley, expressing his view that the act was a violation of the First Amendment: ?To deny a man the privilege of associating and making joint contributions with such other citizens as he may choose is an unjust restraint on his right to propagate and promote his views on public affairs.?
After assessment was eradicated, corporations became the source for campaign funding. In 1886, four years after Ex Parte Curtis, the Supreme Court ruled, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, that, in regards to constitutional protections, a corporation is a person, which is a good part of what got us to Citizens United, in 2010?although, starting in the nineteen-twenties, the cost of broadcast advertising played a role, too, by jacking up the price of running for office.
The problem with most efforts at ending corrupt elections is that as soon as you plug one hole, you find another leak. As I recounted in an essay in the magazine in 2008, urgent and impassioned calls for ending the practice whereby parties and candidates supplied ballots?and, very often, paid voters to cast them?began in the eighteen-forties. Opponents of reform argued that telling candidates and parties they couldn?t print ballots was an infringement of the freedom of speech. This struggle lasted for decades. What?s known as the Australian ballot system?in which the government supplies the ballots?wasn?t accomplished, nationally, until the election of 1896. But that election also marked the birth of the modern campaign-finance system?one in which campaigns are chiefly funded by corporations.
There have been reforms since, of course, and no end to new species of fraud. But how we vote is still determined by a measure intended to put an end to nineteenth-century styles of political corruption. And who pays for elections is still governed by Gilded Age laissez-faire economics. Obama might be the first President in modern history to be outspent in his re?lection campaign. But there are worse fates for a Presidential candidate, including failing to be outspoken.
Illustration by Hannah K. Lee.
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