Election of a President
It is interesting to see how presidential campaigns are funded. On the Democrat side you have people giving one dollar, five dollars, ten dollars and sometimes a tad bit more. Yes the President has some big campaign donors where they max out at $2500 for a plate of chicken and a short speech from the President of the United States of America. But when you look at Governor Romney and his fundraising efforts it is all the people that can max out donations. That should set off an alarm in your head where the Presidency can be bought.
But Romney has proved unable to tap into the emotion-driven small-dollar contributors that helped power Barack Obama in 2008, and which fueled even his more Establishment rival, Hillary Clinton, this time four years ago when she too began to run out of big donors. The result: Republican fundraisers say that despite his success so far, they think Romney is fast approaching a wall, and that he will likely be forced to pay for the campaign out of his own deep pockets.
“I don't know that he’s completely tapped out, but they are trying to look under every stone,” said a top New York Republican fundraiser. “You run out of people you can hit up for $2,500,” he said, referring to the legal limit for primary contributions.
“Here in New York he has had fundraiser after fundraiser after fundraiser,” said another top New York Republican. “Even in New York, there’s only so much you can get out of the city.”
Romney is unusually dependent on those contributions. Over 82 percent of Romney's haul from individuals in 2011 came in donations greater than $1000 —which doesn’t even include the larger donations to the SuperPAC that supports him, Restore Our Future. And as Rick Santorum stays in the game with a growing pool of small donors — to whom he can return for another $20 or $100 when the millions they’ve given him runs out — Romney’s campaign has launched an intense, late scramble for the cash to fend off his conservative challenger. - Buzz Feed
That leads me to think that the people that have been blessed with those huge bank accounts do not want us one dollar, and five dollar, and ten dollar people donations. Money talks and that must mean something. Mitt Romney has tapped into his personal wealth for many campaigns because he could not sell what he was saying. Nobody was buying it with donations that’s for sure. He tapped his own funds to run against Teddy Kennedy and lost it all. He tapped into his own funds to win the Governor’s office in Massachusetts by simply flooding the state with advertisements. He tapped into his own funds in the last presidential election and still lost. We should feel sorry for Mitt Romney, he so much wants the power of the Presidency of this nation that he would put himself on earned income credit tax status. Why does he want it more than the money he built his life up to have? That is the question that us little people that give five and ten bucks will never know because we are not sending our money to Mitt for Prez.
Papamoka
Labels: Campaign Finance, election, Mitt Romney, Obama, President
posted by Papamoka at
8:00 PM
2 Comments:
First Comment:
I thought that the idea to elect a president was not based on the money they had but the people that supported his ideas to be the next president of the country?
C’mon, now, you did not really that. The candidates without the contributions never win.
I think the reason is that the election is primarily decided on emotion. What contributes to emotion is one’s current personal status. How is he doing? And negative campaign ads and sound bites; sound bites because most people are woefully informed and will remain so. Negative ads because most people literally cannot reason well or logically, and so rote negativity works. If one is leaning in the GOP direction, for example, and he hears that Obama supports raping babies and shredding kittens, he will then say “I would never vote for that infant rapist felinicidal maniac,” without considering that the charge may be false.
Some of the more intelligent people will not believe a lie until they have heard it dozens of times. The lie must slowly reflect reality, gradually become real. They rote learn what they know. Therefore, having the money to rote teach is paramount in a political contest.
The only solution is major campaign finance reform or ultimate Supreme Court intervention. Short of one of those, we have a de facto plutocracy.
Second More Important Comment:
There is president for the Supreme Court stepping in, ignoring other Constitutional law, and restoring democracy. In 1962 a case went to the Supreme Court to force the Tennessee State legislation to redistrict. Per the Tennessee Constitution, the state never had to do this until they were ready. However, since the last time districts were drawn, the rural communities had almost vacated, leaving only a handful of people in each rural congressional district. The effect of this was that people in rural communities elected most of the congressmen in that state, meaning that anyone who intended to become a congressmen had to campaign to represent the rural minority and not to represent the urban majority. Therefore, the rural-minority-elected congressmen would never vote to redistrict because that would take power from the minority that elected them and that kept them in office.
Since the federal government could not force Tennessee to structure its legislature this way or that way, it was an unsolvable problem.
The court ruled that enforcing the right of a citizen’s vote to count, stopping a state from effectively disenfranchising him, was a fundamental Constitutional protection, and that no prohibitions against violating the autonomy of a state’s right to structure its own legislature could overrule individual Constitutionally protected liberty. Majority urban votes essentially did not count, as they had no effect on the direction of the state. Therefore, the majority of Tennessee residents were disenfranchised by the state law, which happened to be about redistricting and so happened to touch on the legislature’s structure.
Tennessee was forced to redistrict. This ruling was the original precedent for the one man, one vote, concept.
The Court has stepped in and prevented oligarchy in America in the past and it could, and I believe would, again. However, as you know, it is not currently going in that direction. It’s most recent major ruling concerning this (Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission), went the other way and gave great power to Super PACS, unions and corporations, which makes the nation more plutocratic, not less.
The Court currently has a 5-4 conservative majority. It cannot be liberal reactionary with this constitution.
Two conservative justices are currently in historical retiring age.
Two liberal justices are in retiring age also. That is four justices in all that are nearing the exit.
Obama appointed two justices last year.
It is very likely that the next president will determine the direction of the Supreme Court, by far the most powerful branch of government in the United States, for the next twenty years, or in other words, through 2032. I am middle-aged. That court will sit until I am elderly.
This election is not just about who will win the executive office, which in the grand scheme of things, is not really that relevant. It could be about whether this nation will be an each-man-for-himself Plutocracy or not.
Please pass this along to your fiancé, as I hear rumors she is considering not voting because Obama and Romney are essentially cut from the same cloth. While I agree with her in part, the judicial cloths they will sew onto the American fabric for the next twenty years, if elected, are very, very different; and I cannot stand the thought of the hideous argyle pattern Romney would choose.
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