Having spent quite a bit of time on the campaign trail, I continue to be amazed at how much time candidates spend raising money. I would say that successful candidates end up spending about half of their time doing it. Let's really break this down, though, into what that means to the system.
The purpose of having campaign funds, in our current context, is essentially to run very expensive television and radio advertising campaigns. In fact, races are often handicapped by political observers based upon the amount of cash-on-hand a candidate has leading up to the election, since that has a direct relationship upon the candidate's ability to have a pervasive "air campaign," as they are called. Candidates will be seen at $5,000 a plate dinners, where everybody is dressed in black ties or evening gowns, and the candidate speaks about whatever pet issues appeal to the group of wealthy individuals sitting in the room. And, whatever the candidate actually says creates a social contract with his audience that he will do those things when he once he gets in to office.
One might say that candidates have plenty of room to successfully appease their donors while spending most of their time and energy representing the mass of their constituents. This might be true if candidates had only a couple of donors, or a couple of groups of donors of similar ideological bent or policy preferences, but because the astronomical cost of campaigns requires candidates to raise money from whomever will write them a check, they quickly become beholden to far too many people.
Borrowing from my post a few days ago, a candidate who harnesses technology can achieve the "real dialogue" goal. For example, if a candidate posts a video blog every day, and the content of that video blog is picked up by the mainstream press, then the candidate can still get air time on television, without massive expenditures to purchase slickly produced advertisements. The policy proposals or ideological positions expressed in the video blog will then require a legitimate response from the candidate's opponent(s), meaning that an actual debate will occur on the campaign trail, one of substance even.
An emergent Third Party movement that takes on the political discourse in this manner and on a wide-scale will quickly differentiate itself from the two existing major parties. It is imperative that our hypothetical party be as contrasting as possible, since that will make it clear to the voters that they truly have a rational choice to change the state of politics by voting for a new party. It will also help to allay the traditional fear that I think prohibits most people from voting for Third Parties (or is at least a contributory factor) that is characterized by the saying "stick to the devil you know."
Because there are hundreds of political consultants, political hacks, and others who have spent their lives in politics, there will be tremendous pressure on the people in the emergent Third Party to revert back to the "conventional wisdom" of traditional American politics. The Third Party's leadership must have a consistent dedication to the disciplines I have described above, and rigorously enforce these principles on their candidates, or else they will quickly get sucked into the old way of doing things, and will be choked off because of their inability to raise enough money to compete on that hackneyed old battleground of the 30 second TV commercial.
Now that we have looked a lot of tactics, I would like everybody to keep these things in mind and think about them as we lead into a lengthy, potentially multi-day discussion of how a Third Party's ideological and policy platform should be crafted in order to be successful in today's political environment, and to begin displacing the dominance of the two party system.
No comments:
Post a Comment