Billionaires Going Rogue
If there is one rule of thumb governing campaign finance regulation, or the lack thereof, it is that the consequences of any changes in the system are unpredictable.
In 2002, when Congress enacted the McCain-Feingold law barring large “soft money” contributions from corporations, unions and rich people to the political parties, many observers assumed that the Democrats would suffer more. The party had never fully cultivated a small donor base and had consistently been more dependent on mega-contributions than the Republican Party.
In less than two years, this assumption was proven wrong. First, in the 2004 election, small donors in droves gave their credit card numbers to the Democratic campaign of John Kerry, and Kerry was able to keep pace with George W. Bush, dollar for dollar. Four years later, the cash flow to Barack Obama swamped John McCain. The Internet, and with it the ability of campaigns to inexpensively reach millions of prospective donors, permanently transformed fundraising.
In 2010, campaign finance law was turned on its head. The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and appeals court decisions such as Speech Now v. F.E.C., opened the door to unlimited contributions to technically independent political action committees (super PACs) from corporations, unions and individuals.
The result has been a stupefying array of PACs, 501(c)4s and 501(c)6s that even professionals can barely keep track of. The future that Buckley v. Valeo set in motion almost 40 years ago has arrived, and the current multiplicity and multidirectionality of “reform” has overwhelmed both the people and the parties.
The virtually unanimous view throughout the course of four decades of revised regulation was that the Republican Party and its candidates would be the major beneficiaries, and, so far, that has been true.
The first chart, provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that outside spending tilted left in every year from 2000 to 2008, but that in 2010 — in the aftermath of deregulation — the balance skewed decisively to the right. In the current 2011-12 election cycle, it shifted overwhelmingly to the right:
The movement rightwards of almost half a billion dollars in this cycle alone — signified by the red bar on the graph representing Republican donations — is not, however, the pure gold that analysts on both sides expected.
While, the rapid growth of well-financed and autonomous competitors threatens all existing power structures, the bulk of the costs are likely to fall on the Republican Party. The right wing of the Republican Party has more disruptive potential than the left wing of the Democratic Party because it is more willing to go to extremes: see the billboards showing Obama bowing down before an Arab Sheik, or the ads and DVD claiming that Obama is the bastard son of the African American communist, Frank Marshall Davis.
There are, furthermore, structural and historical differences between the parties: the Republican Party and the conservative establishment is institutionally stronger than the Democratic Party, with an infrastructure that served as a bulwark through the 1960s and 70s – the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Olin Foundation, etc. — when Republicans appeared to be a permanent congressional minority. Its financial prowess enabled the party to enforce more discipline on its consultants and elected officials. The Republican establishment also exercises more authority over policy and candidate selection than does its Democratic counterpart.
In recent years, the Democratic Party organization has gained some strength and it plays a much more active role in campaigns at all levels than in the past, but as an institutional force capable of command and control, it remains light years behind the Republican Party.
Republicans, in contrast to Democrats, prefer hierarchical, well-ordered organizations, and are much more willing to cede authority to those in power. Democrats, despite the discipline of individual campaign efforts, tend more toward anarchy than hierarchy. Historically, one result of this partisan difference is that the Republican establishment has tightly managed candidate selection at the presidential level. With extraordinary consistency, the party has crushed insurgent candidates and selected the next in line. Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole, for example, both had to wait until it was their turn.
The Republican establishment has a full arsenal of weapons at its disposal, including endorsements, favored speaking engagements at key party gatherings, leverage over top consultants and a signaling process to show who has been anointed from on high.
The most powerful weapon of all was always the oversight exercised by party leaders over the flow of money to candidates. Every four years when the nomination process began, business leaders, Republican-leaning trade associations, top corporate law firms and investment bankers slowly formed a consensus behind a favored candidate.
The establishment snuffed out insurgencies, including candidates from the social right — Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer — and candidates from the economic right like Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes. None of these outsiders rose past marginal status, although their presence in primary contests often forced the mainstream candidate to make concessions that proved damaging in the general election.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/billionaires-going-rogue/