Our view: Let locals settle elections, not attack-funding PACs
The bucks keep getting bigger and the attacks they pay for nastier. Never mind that it happens every election and all over the country. Never mind that it has become as much a part of the fabric of modern politics as kissing babies once marked the campaigns of yesteryear. None of that makes it easier to stomach.
The bucks keep getting bigger and the attacks they pay for nastier. Never mind that it happens every election and all over the country. Never mind that both major political parties benefit and silently cheer (and sometimes not so silently) when it’s the other side’s guy in the crosshairs. And never mind it has become as much a part of the fabric of modern politics as kissing babies once marked the campaigns of yesteryear.
None of that makes it easier to stomach.
We’re writing, of course, about the actions of political action committees — or super PACs, as the Big Boys are known. They can muster and throw around seemingly unlimited amounts of money in support of candidates and incumbents they feel will help them the most and be the most on their side once in office. More often than supporting candidates, however, super PACs spend, and spend huge, to degrade and to take down opponents of the candidates they favor.
The more they spend the uglier it gets — with voters never really knowing just who it is that’s launching the attacks or how accurate they’re being with their information.
Super PACs made headlines in the Northland last week when news broke that a liberal-minded one called CREDO Mobile had landed here to knock off freshmen Republican U.S. Reps. Chip Cravaack and Sean Duffy. How much incivility and ugliness will its promised
multimillion-dollar campaign buy? We can all shudder at what’s to come.
Super PACs made headlines across the country yesterday with news that even President Obama, who for years has rightly criticized the increasing influence of super PACs (he even once referred to them as a “threat to democracy”) is embracing the top super PAC supporting him. A flip-flop: not that Obama and his campaign saw much choice.
“When the top GOP super PACs raised about four times as much as the top Democratic super PACs in 2011, it was clear (Obama) would be ceding a major political advantage by continuing to shun super PACs,” Aaron Blake wrote for the Washington Post yesterday. “Now, apparently, he’s prepared to use that destructive tool of campaigning, begrudgingly, because it would be too difficult not to.
“Obama, in effect, is signaling that he is not just ready to play the game,” Blake wrote, “but that he is ready to game the system as well.”
Game? Whether used as a noun or verb, “game” isn’t a word voters are eager to attach to elections and campaigning. Elections are our chance to pick our representatives and leaders, to decide the best man or woman to send to St. Paul or Washington, D.C., on our behalf. Local voters are the ones to make that call on their own. Their ability to do so, like their right to do so, is hijacked whenever super PAC outsiders start spending and slinging.
Tags: our view, opinion, editorials, money, politics
RSS Feeds