Visual source: Newseum
Nicholas Confessore and Jim Rutenberg examine how the new SuperPAC rules are revolutionizing the 2012 race:
Under the old political rules, Mitt Romney arrived in South Carolina this week the prohibitive Republican front-runner: flush with cash, awash in endorsements from a party establishment starting to coalesce behind him and buoyed by victories in Iowa and New Hampshire.
But as Mr. Romney is quickly learning, those rules no longer apply.
Mr. Romney’s carefully tended network of Republican donors has been rendered functionally less important by “super PACs,” through which a handful of wealthy individuals are financing a multimillion-dollar advertising barrage to assail his record and prop up his opponents.
Dana Milbank points out that Republicans who fought for SuperPACs can't complain:
The former House speaker has almost no public support. In New Hampshire, 90.6 percent of Republican primary voters cast their ballots for somebody else. In Iowa, 86.7 percent of caucus-goers chose somebody else. In the two states combined, Gingrich received fewer than 40,000 votes — a tally that wouldn't even land him on some city councils.
But there are 5 million reasons Republicans have to fear Gingrich. That's the number of dollars billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave to a pro-Gingrich super PAC — the largest contribution to a candidate's cause in U.S. history. This allowed the Winning Our Future PAC to buy $3.4 million worth of ads in South Carolina — enough to saturate the state with poisonous messages about Mitt Romney. The almost half-hour video taking apart Romney's performance at Bain Capital, released Wednesday, provides a taste of what's to come in the next week.
Liberals have complained for two years about the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which made such unlimited contributions possible. But Republicans on Capitol Hill resisted attempts to limit the damage of the decision — and now Gingrich is teaching them the consequences of their own actions.
The New York Times informs us that it's never enough for the GOP. Not content enough to let millionaires and billionaires singlehandedly bankroll candidates through SuperPACs, the GOP wants to cut out the middle man and let corporations donate obscene amounts directly to candidates:
With federal campaigns already knee-deep in a new era of laissez-faire money, the Republican National Committee has brazenly proposed the ultimate step — that the 105-year-old ban on direct corporation contributions to candidates and parties be scrapped as unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court’s misguided Citizens United decision did damage enough to fair elections by freeing corporations to make unlimited donations to supposedly independent campaign expenditure groups. But the court said nothing about the basic 1907 reform law — enacted after the robber baron scandals — that bans corporate donors from wooing candidates directly with largess.
The R.N.C., in a brief filed in federal court in Virginia, would effectively spike that law by freeing candidates to solicit what could amount to a million-dollar-plus donation from any corporation seeking clout. The result would dash the anticorruption restrictions on candidates’ money seeking under the McCain-Feingold law, inviting a blizzard of money and favors directly between donors and politicians.
Speaking of corporations, Paul Krugman makes an excellent point: why do we need a "businessman" as president anyway?:
[T]here’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.
Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.
Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.
Bill Press sums up Mitt Romney's philosophy of greed:
He barely won the Iowa primary. He handily won New Hampshire. He's going to win South Carolina next. So now we know the Republican nominee for president will be: Gordon Gekko.
And we also know what he stands for. In the 1987 film "Wall Street," corporate raider Gekko told shareholders of Teldar Paper Company: "I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them!" He went on: "The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works."
See what I mean? In a textbook case of "life imitates art," that's the very same business philosophy espoused by the real-life candidate, Mitt Romney: "Greed is good." It's the perfect bumper sticker for the Romney campaign.
