Buying Main Street: Billionaires swamp local races
It was a gut-punch moment for the local lawman: Already sweating a tough reelection race, he’d just received word that one of the country’s most powerful billionaires was trying to oust him from the Milwaukee County sheriff’s seat.
David Clarke’s provocative rhetoric on guns had made him a political enemy of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — as he learned last week from reading the newspaper.
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“I was like, ‘Wow, this is big-time now,’” Clarke recalled.
With Bloomberg’s effort to defeat him, Clarke joined a growing throng of municipal officeholders whose political careers have been rocked or extinguished by lavish spending from the nation’s ultrarich. A rare black Democrat fiercely allied with the National Rifle Association, Clarke barely squeaked through a Democratic primary vote this week in the face of powerful outside spending, including nearly $200,000 from Bloomberg.
Other officials and candidates haven’t been so lucky.
Frustrated by paralysis at the federal level, the nation’s wealthiest activists have set their sights with increasing frequency on state and local elections as a new route for effecting policy change. The influx of cash from outside billionaires — namely Bloomberg, the industrialist Koch brothers and environmentalist financier Tom Steyer — has upended what would otherwise be bite-size campaigns for obscure municipal and state offices.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/michael-bloomberg-koch-brothers-tom-steyer-110055.html#.U_FD4dt9c2Y.twitter
I know there are still some holdouts, but I have to ask: Are there *ANY* DUers who still want to tell me the Citizens United decision was a GOOD thing??