Money corrupts everything it touches. A necessary evil if ever there was one, this symbol of value abstracts real human value from any one person into a price which can be paid to provide that value from other people. The Founders were not unaware of this. The three Framers who wrote The Federalist Papers were acutely aware of this.
The Republican Party is drenched with money this cycle, thanks to Citizens United. The problem is, that money is flowing along new channels and cutting off the national party organization. In the cusp of an Election Day, weak links begin to fail each day closer the election comes. The weak network of links among groups now loosely arrayed around "Republican" candidates is fraying. Voters are becoming wary of what blindly voting for the candidate branded "Republican" might actually deliver.
Karmageddon is nigh.
The term karmageddon was coined by Tulip in a comment to my diaries Countdown To No Confidence, dicussed more fully here.
Hundreds of bills are pending for Senate cloiture votes. Bills which have been through the mill: headerings, committee votes and deals to bring it to the floor. Many of them are confirmations. Many of them are remedies for things like undisclosed money and enough regulation to ferret out foreign donations.
At the end of this Congress, some of those bills will have to go back and return through the process. Technically, all of them would, but there are ways to bring them forward quickly if the way has been made for them. In this cycle, without any legislation to blunt the effect of Citizens United, scattered amongst those bills are specific targets by specific constituencies. Money is pouring forth to tackle narrow points above all others. Money is pouring forth to address real and imagined threats of legislation which never has existed or which would have low odds of ever being passed.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Money is pouring forth to mix and match dog whistles to tea partiers and old money Repubicans and Hispanic groups and... The Rovian Message Machine is running on idle, barely fed enough money to keep the RNC or the RCCC or the RSCC or the other centralized organs of the party a player in the game. Nirbana's diary discusses how the money flood from wealthy candidates in California is creating an atmosphere of distrust in voters so when a scandal pops up, the polls can shift quickly.
As the dynamic system of politics approaches an election, such atmospherics prepare the way for dramatic changes in what people will actually vote in the privacy of the booth. The arc of this campaign is to hold the majority in both houses. Holding that line depends on getting out the vote, but it also depends on the sense of direction of things in each voter's own viewpoint.
Dramatic shifts have already happened, some are underway and a whole probability cloud of them could be triggered in the unstable equilibrium of this election cycle. Especially in midterm elections, small perturbations can be amplified into wholesale rebalancing of the whole landscape in individual races.
The diminished ability of the Republican party machine is also driven by money. Fox News, the Limbaugh empire, Sarah Palin's tweets and a host of other stimuli are vying for precious media cycles. No matter the narrative, anything can come over the transom at any moment to attract the attention of someone in some medium, and then work its way through new channels in unexpected ways to reach the cable news circuit. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, the media large and small are trolling for food.
As Rachel Maddow pointed out last week, macaca moments are much harder to trigger these days.
We wanted to do a story tonight. At news meeting today, what we pitched was, what I pitched was a story tonight about whether there‘s anybody calling foul when candidates say bigoted things—whether anyone is saying, whoa, when politics takes a turn toward not really politics at all.
And I thought we would have a couple of examples that we would investigate. We ended up shooting into the double digits of examples and ultimately just stopped taking down new ones in the interest of time. This isn‘t a here and there one-off accidental thing happening in the elections this year. There‘s a ton of this stuff.
Rachel Maddow Show, October 19, 2010
Voters seem inured now to outrageous statements and behavior. That indolence means much more money has to be spent, and still has to be spent cunningly, to stand out from the gloss. The spread of more polling places over more time before Election Day also means captive voter pools can be exploited, like using megachurches so worshipers can vote before, between and after church services.
But the overall effect of more polling stations and more convenient voting is reaching a new level. College campuses are providing places on campus for students to vote. That could increase the percentages of their vote since getting off campus and to a polling place decreases the odds many students would vote, especially in an off-year election.
Any dynamic system has limits. It has limits on how much its effects can be on the environment and other systems. It has limits on how and how diverse its inputs can be before more input volume is wasted. Cybernaticians in the 1960s noticed the logistics growth curve tended to emerge in the growth and evolution of dynamic systems.
The curve looks like an "S", starting out with slow growth, then accelerating until a natural limit is reached and flattening out to a plateau. So much money is being pumping into this little election that when each race plateaus, more money won't matter. Simply saturating all the advertising slots on TV and radio is a natural limit being reached in many markets around the nation.
The Magical Message Machine
The Rove Message Machine and the Rove Voting Machine were once seemingly unbeatable. They were finely-tuned systems comprised of volunteers, media coordination, databases and a host of other elements which worked together to greatly magnify their effect on specific races around the nation. Remnants of that machine are still in place, but the top talent who created those centralized systems are now for hire to higher bidders.
New machines have been set up to push specific pet agendas by an increasing field of specific interests. These new machines are loosely coupled to the party machines, and that divergence leads to stomping on each others' messages in unexpected ways. Whoever thought John McCain at a California rally was a good idea saw the soundbite from that rally to be a "get off my lawn" moment about Barbara Boxer that just looked stupid. Sarah sails into town with her PR crews and their machine is crankin'. The gloss gets louder and murkier at the same time.
As the aftermath of the Citizen's United decision ripples out through these multiple systems set up by so many players, we may find the limits of more money. I suspect a higher percentage of the money per voter being spent this cycle will actually yield only a marginal impact on the vote. Emotion and atmospherics are nonlinear, so they can't be modeled precisely. Congress needs to pass mandatory disclosure laws, and the Netroots will need to evolve new ways to get that information out quickly. But that will be for future elections, assuming Congress manages to pass some remedy.
Unleashing The Flood
But money has been unleashed, and it is a nasty and unpredictable tool. Interference patterns among all the ripples induced by all the players with all their media experts will be unpredictable. Kossacks will need to be on their toes to exploit those gaps in the Message Machine. We have been getting better and better at sharing information fast. We will need to get even better still.
Our only advantage from all this in this strange money-free-for-all election is that the professionals are less able to predict precise outcomes and that random events can cascade the whole media machine of one candidate to collapse and leave the other standing. Their models are like simulating the dropping of a pebble into a pool. Even dropping several pebbles at even and precise intervals can be modeled. But handfuls of pebbles thrown randomly by thousands of people, and no computer can sort it out. The geeks are flying blind in this election. So much the better, if we simply get out the vote.
Money isn't everything, even in politics. In fact, it could be working for the progressive agenda because we have built our majorities in the electorate the old-fashioned way -- people are wising up to the price to be paid for blindly following people who say they can control things no sane human could claim.
Overreach. Overload. Overlook.
These demons in the machines are raging this cycle. When they become too obvious, as money has in Whitman's election and, possibly, Fiorna's election, they themselves become a problem for the machine to control. As you get out the vote, look for those gaps and voids in the bulwark the regressives are trying to create. Look for that sense of unease that votes are being bought and jump on it with both feet. Make waves. Reach out. Get people to the polls even if they don't know how they will vote.
Feed the machines random acts of citizenship. They are as likely as not to explode.
GOTV