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The Buying of the President 1996

Concluding Thoughts

The Czech writer Vaclav Havel, is his essay “The Power the Powerless,” writes of a greengrocer who, for most of his days, went along with a totalitarian system of government in order to “get along in life.” One day, Havel recounts, “something in our greengrocer snaps” and he stops living a lie. “He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. Rejecting the manipulation, Havel’s hero begins to ”live within the truth” . . . he has shattered the world of appearances. . . . He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power.”

This book has attempted to expose the real foundations of power in the 1996 presidential election and in the U.S. national political process, in the hopes that everyday citizens in this country will stop living the lie of quadrennial campaign pap, vacuous rhetoric, advertising, and who’s-ahead? analysis. The synergy of the investigative profiles in The Buying of the President reveals a grim, extraordinarily compromising, political process. There is an entirely legal, corrupt mercenary culture full of nuance and subtlety, in which ultimately all participants in the money chase become tainted. Even the best-intentioned, thoughtful, innately honest candidate can find his schedule booked day and night with fundraising events and exclusive breakfast, lunch, and dinner schmooze sessions with America’s wealthiest patrons — and later find himself doing favors for them in return for their campaign contribution largesse.

As we have shown throughout this book, every major announced presidential candidate has become entangled over the course of his public career with multimillion-dollar interests instrumental to his electoral success. None of these candidates or the would-be -"wild card” contenders are “reformers” outside of the established political order.

It is contrary to human nature to admit being beholden to anyone. Politicians, of course, do not like to discuss who has underwritten their candidacies, and seldom do. But that lack of responsiveness by our representatives, the people who work for us, should no longer be acceptable. A democracy without accountability is hardly a democracy at all. The people must be able to ask questions of their elected representatives and be heard. Our political discourse today desperately requires more straightforward candor and openness. Our chosen leaders can cloud or ignore potentially unflattering questions, because we tolerate and, therefore, allow it. Instead of using campaign finance income disclosure filings to measure stature and support as a viable candidate, the public and the news media should ask not only where the money comes from, but exactly what it buys. Instead of referring reporters to the Federal Election Commission or saying “we’ll get back to you,” politicians should be put on the spot, now, “live” and in person, and asked tough-but-fair questions about their campaign cash and what they have done to receive it over the years. Instead of being spoon-fed the candidates’ policy positions or being subjected to superficial news and advertising soundbites, it’s time the voter discovered a different kind of scorecard — not just the candidates’ positions on issues but “follow the money” information illuminating why they may happen to hold such positions. That was the precise intent of The Buying of the President.

We have provided specific information about specific candidates for this specific presidential election, in an attempt to better inform voters as they select the next president of the United States. Beyond that we hope this book has opened some eyes about how this country actually chooses its national leader. In 1992, $1.47 billion was contributed to candidates for federal office, only a paltry amount of which came from “ordinary citizens.” The Center for Responsive Politics has computed that less than 1 percent of the population gave 77 percent of all campaign contributions to congressional races that year! Simply stated, the wealthiest interests bankroll and, in effect, help to preselect the specific major candidates months and months before a single vote is cast anywhere. We are thus allowing our government of the people, by the people, and for the people to be led by someone initially chosen by only some of the people — narrow, vested interests with a direct financial stake in specific government policies and decisions. We, the people have become a mere afterthought of those whom we have put in office, a prop in our own play.

As passive participants watching and thereby allowing our elected officials to assume and maintain power in a money-dependent manner, we detach ourselves as citizens from the process because it all seems overwhelming, impermeable, and inaccessible to a mere individual. The candidates too frequently speak in soothing, irrelevant bromides, and unless you are a wealthy donor, they are difficult to talk to directly before or after the election. We either go to the polls mumbling about our limited choices, or we don’t bother to vote at all. The distrust and disenchantment about politics in America today are not particularly mysterious.

James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers (No. 51) that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” As citizens we generally understand that government is essential as a public arbiter between competing financial and other interests. For government to play such a significant, mediative, consensus-building role, however, the people must have confidence and trust in their public officials and their official decisions. Are our leaders protecting and serving the broad public interest, acting for the common good of the nation?

A positive response to that question is, to put it kindly, difficult to summon for a great many Americans today. But the gnawing reality for too many of us is that simply “voting them out” never seems to change all that much because they are all products of the same system. In 1992, the American people turned out an incumbent Republican president. In 1994, they rejected the Democratic-controlled Congress. In 1995, public opinion polls indicated that the American people trust their government less than during the Watergate scandal in 1972-1974. No fewer than 93 percent of Americans believe that “government wastes too much of our money,” but interestingly, there is no consensus whatsoever about how this happens in Washington, which interests benefit, and how to reform it. Incumbent politicians understand that the rage is unfocused and unharnessed, enabling them to remain substantively unresponsive. Some of that rage was throttled in 1995 when the Supreme Court ruled that “throw-all-the-bums-out” term limit initiatives are unconstitutional. Change never begat change: The Republican “reform” Congress led by Speaker Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America,” and the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, whose campaign slogan was “Putting People First,” both postured then punted on political reform proposals to reduce the role of money in campaigns and drastically curb the influence of lobbyists in Washington. It didn’t take long for the newcomers to feel at home in Washington. The 73 freshmen “reform” Republicans elected in 1994, who had pledged to clean up Washington, took in $11 million toward their reelection from special interests in their first six months in office.

Against such a sordid backdrop, there is no reason to believe that the 1992 and 1994 popular anger and frustration have subsided in the least in 1996. The problem, though, is that the electorate is disconnected not only from Washington, but from any palpable hope and solution for cleaning up the political process. Volumes have been written and hundreds of ideas espoused about how to reform the campaign finance system, from reducing the role of private money completely through public financing, to removing all regulation and returning to the cash-in-suitcases days that led up to Watergate. There is no national consensus, however, about what should be done, which is not surprising since there also has been no national “bully pulpit” education or leadership on this issue. To top it all off, any national solution must be approved by incumbent beneficiaries of the current, corrosive money politics system, which is tantamount to asking the foxes to lock themselves out of the henhouse.

So what, then, can we really do? Through The Buying of the President and other information, you should recognize the truth and hold public officials to a higher standard of conduct and accountability about the role of money in politics today. If candidates promised during the campaign to “clean up Washington,” find out specifically if or how they have attempted to accomplish that “on the job.” Remember to look closely behind mere public posturing; just how active and aggressively responsive to the popular will have they been as your public servants? And how closely are their public actions and positions related to the agendas of their career patrons? Follow the money.

Regardless of the absence of leadership and national consensus, the mechanism by which to change things does, and has always, existed. Never particularly easy to use, it ultimately allows citizens to affirm or deny who shall represent their interests, through everything from various party primaries and caucuses to the general election and beyond that, and to directly change the system through state ballot initiatives or even constitutional amendments. The mechanism has been corroded and corrupted, but the citizens of this nation are still ultimately responsible for the quality of our government. For Havel, who became the president of his country, that American reality gave him hope while he was a political prisoner. We have come to take it for granted. The political process has lost its identity and dignity. That should not stand as the example of American democracy to the world.