Photo Credit: C-SPAN
Tom Engelhardt
Sometimes words outlive their
usefulness. Sometimes the gap between changing reality and the names
we’ve given it grows so wide that they empty of all meaning or retain
older meanings that only confuse us. “Election,” “presidential election
campaign,” and “democracy” all seem like obvious candidates for
name-change.
I thought about
this recently as President Obama hustled around my hometown, snarling
New York traffic in the name of Campaign 2012. He was, it turned out,
“hosting” three back-to-back fundraising events: one at the tony Gotham
Bar and Grill for 45 supporters at $35,800 a head (the menu:
roasted beet salad, steak and onion rings, with apple strudel,
chocolate pecan pie, and cinnamon ice cream -- a meal meant to “shine a
little light” on American farms); one for 30 Jewish supporters at the
home of Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, for at
least $10,000 a pop; and one at the Sheraton Hotel, evidently for the
plebes of the contribution world, that cost a mere $1,000 a head. (Maybe
the menu there was rubber chicken.)
In the course of his several meals, the president pledged his support
for Israel (in the face of Republican charges that he is eternally soft
on the subject), talked about “taxes and the economy” to his
undoubtedly under-taxed listeners, and made this stirringly meaningless
but rousing comment: “No matter who we are, no matter where we come
from, we're one nation. We're one people. And that's what's at stake in
this election."
Outside his final event, Occupy Wall Street protesters saw something else at stake, dubbing him the “1% president.” The end result
from a night’s heavy lifting: $2.4 million for his election campaign
and the Democratic National Committee, nowhere close to 1% of what they
will need for the next year.
These were the 67th, 68th, and 69th fundraisers attended by Obama so far in 2011, or the 71st, 72nd, and 73rd.
(It depended on who was counting.) In either case, we’re talking about
approximately one fundraiser every five days, a total of 6% of the
events in which Obama took part in this non-election year.
Think
about that. You vote for the president to spend some part of 20% of
his days raising money for his own future from the incredibly wealthy.
Or put another way, the Washington Post now estimates
that if you add in the non-fundraising, election-oriented events that
involve him -- 63 so far in 2011 -- perhaps 12% of his time is taken up
with campaign efforts of one sort or another; and this is what he’s been
doing 12 to 24 months before the election is scheduled to happen.
New
York being the home of... gulp... Wall Street (1%! 1%!), Obama doesn’t
exactly have it to himself. Mitt Romney was heading into town on
December 14th for his own rousing round of four fundraisers. One at the Waldorf Astoria will be hosted
by -- you can’t be balder than this -- four JPMorgan Chase executives,
including James B. “Jimmy” Lee, Jr., the vice chairman of the company
and the “banker who battled the Obama administration over the
restructuring of Chrysler LLC.” And oh yes, Romney leads Obama in funding support from billionaires, 42 to 30 (with Rick Perry taking third place at 20).
In
the 2008 election, JPMorgan employees gave $4.6 million to the
candidates of their choice, coming in behind only Goldman Sachs and
Citigroup on The Street. Now that, I would say, is actual electoral
power. Perhaps it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that
the voting that matters most takes place at those fundraisers, not in
the booths where, billions of dollars in attack ads later, the usual hoi
polloi pull the handles on electoral slot machines.
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