LAST year, during our own presidential elections, one of the issues that emerged, and something I believe that was agreed to by all parties, was the need for comprehensive campaign finance legislation. I believe that, whenever our politicians begin to proceed along this path in a concrete way, there are lessons to be learnt from the current US Republican primaries, lessons which will no doubt be enhanced by the presidential campaign slated for later this year. Perhaps the most damning aspect of the current American political system – and it is coming to the fore during these Republican perhaps more than at any other point in my memory – the corrupting role of money in deciding the vote, at least potentially.
While campaign finance laws limit individual citizen donations to $1000, and $5000 for traditional political action committees (PACs, committees established to raised funds for political candidates or political parties), recent legislation by the Supreme Court has changed the law so that corporations can put any amount of money into advocacy for or against a candidate or party during a political campaign.
If, for example, a candidate is pro-petroleum, a private citizen, including a friend of the candidate can create what is referred to as a Super PAC, which Big Oil can pour any amount of funds into; that Super PAC can then go on to create ads supporting that candidate and/or attacking his or her opponents.  The only stipulation is that there be no collaboration between the Super PAC and the official campaign, although a candidate can address a Super PAC supporting him or her through the media.
If anything the rise of the Tea Party has shown it is that covert corporate financing of political movements – in this case by Koch Industries – can have a defining impact not just on public policy but on those who get elected in the first place to create those policies.  The difference now is that the sort of funding that the Koch brothers spent over two decades having to funnel through various front groups, they can now do more directly through what are now called Super PACs.
Political satirist and arguably the most active opponent of Super PACS, Stephen Colbert, put it nicely when he said on his show, The Colbert Report:
“To all the worrywarts out there who said Super PACs were going to lead to a cabal of billionaires secretly buying democracy – wrong . They are publicly buying democracy.”
Colbert’s response was to create his own Super PAC, one which raised over a million dollars, money he has used to create ads to endorse Herman Cain (who is no longer in the race), and to Ricky Perry, attack Mitt Romney, Super PACs, and even himself.
“We raised it on my show,” said Colbert,“and used it to materially influence the elections – in full accordance with the law. It’s the way our founding fathers would have wanted it, if they had founded corporations instead of just a country.”
In my view, the corporate influence in American politics, particularly the presidential race, comes out of something more fundamental – the average American politician’s need for a personal legacy more than anything else, and at the expense of everything else.  It can’t be for the public good because there are movie stars and NGO heads or even multi-term congressmen who do more for the public good than the average presidential candidate.
It can’t be for the power because there are industry leaders and media people who wield power more sustainably over a longer period than the four or eight years of the average American presidency and with much more individual latitude – Oprah Winfrey appears higher and more frequently on Influential People lists than most of them.  It can’t be for the money because the presidency is not only comparatively not high-paying, but you have candidates like Mitt Romney who has probably lost more money in his campaign than he would hope to earn, directly or indirectly, as President.
Now, nothing is wrong if it is that you believe that you as an individual has a legacy that is going to suit the greater good, because in the long run, that is what being President of any nation should be about.  But of the four horses left in the race, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, there is only one – and currently the last in the pack – that impresses me in any way.  Or as Colbert himself put it in a recent interview,
“I really like Ron Paul. The guy is intellectually consistent. He absolutely — he says the same thing he said on Monday that he said on Sunday. He doesn’t change with the winds. That’s admirable.”
And he’s right.  Now, I may not agree with many things that Ron Paul has said.  For example, he believes in cutting U.S. foreign aid to zero, and then slowly rebuilding from there.  As someone who has seen the overwhelming positive effects of properly managed foreign aid – and who can reasonably gauge the consequences of the absence of such aid – this is not something I can agree with or even acknowledge there being any practicality to.
And while I get the gist of some of his views on the excesses of the Civil Rights legislation, in that they are contradictory to his libertarian values – small government, freedom of speech, individual liberty, ethics and morality as things you can encourage and foster but not legislate – there are certain pronouncements of his, particular from the early nineties which border on  racism.
That said, Paul has been brave enough and gutsy enough to defend his apparently extremist positions with the same consistency and passion as he has presented his mostly sane and reasoned convictions, qualities that I expect in what I conceive of as the ideal politician; and this is something absent in people like Romney, Gingrich and Santorum.
In closing, while my support for Barack Obama’s incumbency is unwavering, I believe that a man is defined by the quality of his opponents, and the arena in which he operates.  With Romney and Gingrich – the two front runners of the Republican primaries – already shamelessly using (or not objecting to) their respective Super PACs viciously attacking each other as well as the Obama administration, with less and less policy and an increasingly inflammatory rhetoric, I can’t help but wish that Obama would – in the interest of American democracy, which has often been seen as a beacon for democracy elsewhere – end up facing a reasoned and honourable Ron Paul than any of the other choices.
At this point, with Paul being a consistent and close third place candidate behind Gingrich and Romney in primary after primary, I suppose that the best scenario would be for him to emerge, as the primaries come to end, as a third force to negotiate with in order for a clear victor to emerge.  That way, we can have a Republican candidacy that benefits from an infusion of Paul’s good sense and decency, and a tempering of the sort of belligerent and often deficient rhetoric that has been coming out the campaigns of the two front-runners.