By Harold Henderson
“No one takes you seriously unless you raise money,” she says. “Political insiders all wrote me off until I raised $350,000. Then, all of a sudden, people who had never talked to me before started saying, ‘That’s a lot of money.’” By the end of the race, she says, she’d pulled in close to $900,000–more than Blagojevich. (Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, there’s no limit on campaign spending in federal elections.) But Blagojevich got more votes and went on to defeat Republican incumbent Michael Flanagan in November.
Kaszak’s predicament shows that money and politics are a questionable mix. Paradoxically, it also shows that reform and politics are also a questionable mix: if Congress hadn’t reformed the process in 1974 by outlawing individual contributions over $1,000, Kaszak could have raised her money faster and spent more time campaigning at el stops than in professional offices.
Former Democratic National Committee chair David Wilhelm offered a similar list of concerns at a May 19 forum hosted by the local group Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century. He concluded by pleading, “I just want everybody to think these things through.”
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The Democratic and Republican parties evolved into competing patronage machines and rallying points. Issues became secondary. Thousands of federal jobs changed hands every time one party took over from the other. The parties financed their operations by having all jobholders kick back a portion of their pay. (In 1878 the Republican congressional committee got 90 percent of its money from these “assessments” on federal officeholders.) Politics was more like following the White Sox than deliberating the merits of ethanol subsidies.
Early in this century that too began to change, as Progressives in both parties promoted the idea of voting as individual expression on issues–“I vote for the man, not the party.” (This was just one of a host of moralistic reforms pushed by the turn-of-the-century Progressive movement, which included Jane Addams, Robert LaFollette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.) Over time–very slowly in Chicago–patronage power and party control withered away. Today most candidates don’t go out of their way to mention their party affiliation, they raise most of their own money, they compete with each other in primary elections (themselves a Progressive-era innovation) rather than wait for the party to give them their turn. As free agents, today’s “entrepreneurial candidates” are on their own in a way that 19th-century politicians almost never were.
Of course money fueled the old system of patronage democracy, but it did so through “mediating institutions” such as big-city machines. The machines distributed jobs and garbage cans to ordinary people, as well as aid to aspiring politicians. Now that the old system is mostly gone, most folks have to buy their own garbage cans–and aspiring politicos need to imbibe the fuel directly.
