The sad thing was that the Times deemed it A18 material
Tue May 13, 2008 at 11:23:12 AM PDT
After sifting through the absolutely horrifying stories about the Chinese earthquake and the refusal of the Burmese junta to let aid workers aid, it was a relief to get to the domestic politics section of the New York Times this morning.
There, however, I came across an article (buried back on page A18), A Usually Legal Practice That Wears Black Eyes that struck me as a little bit funny, a little bit sad, and as a big reminder about why Obama and his campaign are valuably different.
Basically, it's a story of the Clinton campaign's reliance on "street money" or "walking around money." The humor is that, in a move reminiscent of the plan to pay bloggers for pro-Clinton posts, the Clinton campaign essentially has to buy its support -- and it still lost. (Even if such measures -- and/or Obama's refusal to engage in them -- made the difference in Texas and Pennsylvania.)
But walking around money is a scandal. Essentially, free agent local leaders throw their weight -- and their campaigning efforts -- behind whomever gives them more money. A standout quote:
Mr. Miller, for instance, was a rare black politician who backed Mrs. Clinton in Ohio and had been under tremendous pressure from constituents in his heavily African-American district to support Mr. Obama. In an interview, he acknowledged that the $38,300 he received from the Clinton campaign "looks like I’ve been paid off," but he said he had kept none of the money for himself.
After signing a contract with the campaign just before the primary, Mr. Miller said, he hired people to carry signs at polling places, drive voters to the polls and canvass neighborhoods. Paying them was necessary, he said, because in the heavily black precincts of Cleveland, "it’s not popular to be with Hillary Clinton."
What I found depressing about the article is that this is not cast as a cause for greater outrage. The article takes pains to underscore how common the practice is, and the Times gave it essentially filler space with its A18 location.
If this were happening in another country, we'd all shake our heads and go "tsk, tsk." After all, as the world's oldest continuous democracy, we're supposed to take pride in the fact that we chose our politician's based on the issue-based (or perhaps character-based) appeals they make to voters. [OK -- perhaps not the best example. But still . . .] When a politician goes out and buys local-level surrogates, it's the same kind of stinky clientelism that rightly deserves condemnation were it to be observed in, say, Zimbabwe. (And most Zimbabweans, save those on the take, would be quick to agree).
Of course, as the world's oldest continuous democracy, we've seen a bit of everything, and many a city is known to work this way. Chalk it up to "politics as usual" if you want. But just because it is what it is doesn't mean we have to live with it.
Which makes me proud, once again, of the campaign Senator Obama is running. He famously (infamously, to some) eschewed the street money approach in Philly. (The article tries to draw some equivalence with money paid out to Obama supporters on college campuses. The parallel is faulty: giving people who already support you resources so they can campaign on their behalf is called "campaigning." Giving free agents money so that they can support you (and, wink wink, spend those resources on campaigning) is called corruption, or buying votes.) It reminds me that change really means something, and that this campaign really is about something different.
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