A few weeks ago, an elderly woman living on a pension told me she was concerned about U.S. Senator Gary Peters, who she liked and supported. She had gotten an urgent fund raising appeal from Peters, and she wanted to know if I thought she should donate to his campaign.
Campaign, that is, for another term in the Senate, an election which is still more than a year and a half away. I promptly forwarded her another email from his campaign, one that showed that he raised a record $1.9 million in the first quarter of this year.
The woman was stunned. She shouldn’t have been: This political Wheel of Fortune has been whirring full-time for years. Senator Peters isn’t any worse than anyone else in office or on the Internet; they pretty much all do it, and feel they have to.
Politicians, another friend of mine acidly noted, are like panhandlers and street prostitutes, with one exception: There are certain times of day when those pests aren’t out there.
But you are apt to be email-bombarded 24/7 with politicians trying to separate you form some of your cash. As a journalist, and a subscriber to a lot of media, I am on a lot of mailing lists, and so I get these from candidates all over the country.
For some reason, many of these appeals think my name is Jeff. The entreaties never stop, even though I never donate to any of these campaigns. Every time a new presidential candidate appears, most of the ones already in ask for cash to ward them off.
In one of the funniest of these, Beto O’Rourke asked me for $3 when Joe Biden announced. Apparently Beto has a realistic assessment of my net worth, though he still called me Jeff. Four years ago, I was bombarded with entreaties from someone running against Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the Democratic primary. Then he ran as an independent candidate. Just before the election, he sent me one promising that would be the last appeal I would ever get from him, win or lose. He lost, badly.
Within a few days he was back, asking for money for the next election cycle.
This year, one of the newly elected Michigan members of Congress asked me for money for the next election before she was sworn in for the first time. And in an ultimate act of chutzpah, Andy Levin emailed me yesterday. Last week, a panel of federal judges ruled that because of gerrymandering his district, like many others, would have to be redrawn.
Levin, who took over the seat from his father, is in a completely safe Democratic district. But that may now change. He said “when all the dust settles, there’s a real chance that I will have a target on my back as I run in a district that is even more Republican.”
Ah, yes. Competition is a bitch.
He asked me for $250 if I could afford it, and five bucks if I couldn’t. But at least he got my name right. This is no way to run a democracy, even if the U.S. Supreme Court said, as it did in its infamous Citizens United decision (2010) that there can be no limits on campaign spending.
What we have now is a situation where it sometimes costs millions to win – or lose—a piddly seat in the Michigan legislature. If you want devastating proof, look at that invaluable website, the Michigan Campaign Finance Network. (Mcfn.org.) We have to do something.
I am just not sure what.
