All Mighty Words

Most civic-minded folks who care about politics wince when they hear about the amounts of money involved. One typical editorial, in the Orlando Sentinel last April, called the costs of the presidential race disturbing. Even some of the candidates find the sums distasteful. John McCain famously spearheaded the campaign-finance-reform effort, and back in April, Barack Obama felt compelled to tell the Associated Press, “The fact that I am raising obscene amounts of money for this presidential race doesn’t make me a hypocrite.”

But why all the carping? Don’t the stakes justify spending a billion dollars? Microsoft is shelling out $500 million to promote its new Vista operating system; shouldn’t a potential presidency entail an equally robust marketing effort? (See costs of some recent ad campaigns versus costs of political campaigns.)  The president, after all, oversees an almost $3 trillion budget (funded mostly by our taxes), decides when to send in the troops (and can do so almost single-handedly), and gets to nominate every new federal judge (most notably, the Supreme Court justices).

Given the magnitude of the decision and the cost of any branding campaign, the election industry’s spending of a billion dollars (over a four-year period) hardly seems overblown—especially for candidates who race onto the field with little or no brand identity. Critics argue that the presidential candidates are forced to spend too much time filling their campaign war chests and that this mad money empowers bundlers, who seek to increase their influence by bringing donors together. But such concerns might have less to do with overall spending than with the artificially low caps on individual contributions ($2,300 for the primary season, $2,300 more for the general election). Is there some study out there suggesting that presidential candidates would be corrupted by a $5,000 donation, but for $4,600, their integrity lives on unscathed?

It’s frustrating that while the government can’t limit your spending as a candidate, it can limit your donations without violating the First Amendment. So Michael Bloomberg could drop $2 billion to try to get himself elected president, but he can’t even donate five grand to someone he thinks would do a better job.

Much of the whining about massive spending stems from critics’ elitist view of politics. If we were all conscientious enough to read the New York Times, watch every presidential debate, and attend the church of Russert every Sunday, then campaigns wouldn’t have to vie for our attention in the chaotic consumer marketplace. But it doesn’t work that way in our democracy.

The pundits who decry high campaign costs are often the same people who rail against low voter turnout. Their angst is contradictory. Turning out voters takes money—lots of it. In 2004, the Bush campaign spent $345 million, and the Kerry campaign spent $310 million—both recordbreaking sums, which were credited with increasing turnout to 122 million voters. That $655 million total worked out to $5.37 spent per “consumer.”

Even though that’s a low per capita cost, the increasing price of campaigns is swamping the public financing program that matches funds for candidates who abide by its draconian spending limits. Meanwhile, the public’s support of the program is plummeting. Voters don’t seem to want their tax dollars earmarked for candidates they don’t support. All of the 2008 front-runners opted out of the program for the primary season, as Bush and Kerry did in 2004.

Fundraising ability does reflect political appeal in our market-based political culture. Given the national mood, it’s hardly surprising that both the Democratic Party’s establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, and its insurgent, Obama, raised more than $100 million last year, while no Republican did. Nor is money always the deciding factor: The low-budget Republican candidate Mike Huckabee handily upset Mitt Romney’s juggernaut in the Iowa caucuses. All in all, 2008 seems to be a particularly bad year to be making the case that money plays a pernicious role in our politics.

Many citizens feel empowered by the chance to put their money where their vote is. Obama’s campaign had more than a quarter-million individual donors by mid-January, thanks in part to the instant access to campaigns provided by the internet.

The big money in presidential politics reflects both the resources used to reach the least engaged voters and the surging engagement of millions more. That’s not a matter for hand-wringing. That’s a cause for celebration.

Editor’s Note: Since this story was published, Barack Obama tapped his Senate colleague, Joe Biden of Delaware, to be his running mate on the Democratic ticket. For more on how Biden, a Catholic, impacts the 2008 race, click here.

Michael Sean Winters has a name for Democrats who have abandoned their party in recent years: Catholics.

In Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats, Winters, a columnist for the Catholic World, argues that the Democrats discovered how to win presidential elections only when, in the 1930s, they formed a left-center alli­ance with working-class Catholics. This lasted half a century, until Catholic voters deserted Jimmy Carter in 1980. The party would lose five of the next seven elections, and in 2004, Senator John Kerry would fail to carry the Catholic vote. If that does not sound astonishing, imagine Senator Barack Obama losing the black vote. “How did the Demo­crats lose the Catholics?” a bishop asked Winters. He attempts to answer this very question.

Long before pundits fretted about women or the African American vote, Catholics created the template for demo­graphic groups in American politics. The target of shameful bigotry, Catholics were reviled by erstwhile liberals beginning with Tom Paine. In time, with their growing numbers, Catholics grabbed control of city halls (as would other groups), but the ultimate power in Washington remained off-limits. Even when John F. Kennedy secured his party’s nomination for president, the influential Calvinist preacher Norman Vincent Peale felt no shame in warning, “Our American culture is at stake.”

Kennedy rejected any religious influence on his politics; as Winters notes, he “was interested in bringing Catholics into the mainstream even if it meant leaving Catholicism itself at the door.” Not so dissimilarly, Obama’s appeal is partly that of a black man who does not wear his ethnicity on his sleeve.

What interests Winters, though, is not that Catholics opened the door for ethnic and religious groups, but the way in which their moral and cultural values helped inspire a successful Democratic coalition. He begins his story with Monsignor John Ryan, an early-20th-century priest who championed social causes like unemployment insurance. A founder of the National Council of Christians and Jews, Ryan became a confidant of such New Dealers as Frances Perkins and Felix Frankfurter. During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first campaign for president, Ryan served as an informal adviser, and he gave the benediction at F.D.R.’s second inauguration. In naming this chapter “The Priest and the President Create the New Deal,” Winters rather comically overstates Ryan’s role; he presents no evidence that Ryan influenced Roosevelt, only that Ryan was in sync with F.D.R.’s agenda.

Yet is Winters right in arguing that the New Deal had a Catholic flavor? I think he is. The Democratic agenda of the ’30s was tied to the notion of community. Its vision was more social than economic; hence it offered support for artists, public-works programs, and farm communities. It championed labor unions, which had as profound a role in knitting together neighborhoods as did the Roman Catholic Church. The soul of the New Deal was aimed, parish­like, at neighborhood and town.

In contrast with contemporary Democrats, who idolize bankers, Roosevelt was suspicious of Wall Street. Blasted by the rich as a traitor to his class, Roosevelt also deviated from his Episcopalian background. The Protestant work ethic honors the entrepreneurial spirit; Catholicism is wary of it.

Were the New Deal alive today, Winters says, Democrats would stress social issues, such as reducing the number of high-school dropouts. Instead, they are fixated on economics. What most distinguishes modern Democrats is their focus on the rights of the individual as opposed to the welfare of the group. It is this un-Catholic vision that Winters says has led to the party’s downfall. Regrettably, Winters targets Kennedy as a primary culprit. By promising to keep (his) religion out of the White House, Winters argues, Kennedy in effect authorized Democrats to abandon morality.

Winters devotes much ink to proving that public figures (then and now) invoke the Bible. He does this to buttress his claim that, J.F.K. notwithstanding, religion is an inseparable aspect of American politics. But the examples he cites, among them Martin Luther King Jr.’s perorations, fail to make his point. They refer to Judeo-Christian ethics in a broad sense. What Winters has in mind is specifically Catholic morality.

Thus he faults the Democrats for being “unyielding” on abortion. He argues that allowing stem-cell research is not a straight­forward issue. He embraces Catholic limitations on warfare that would forbid the government from aiming weapons at civilian populations—the very strategy that kept the peace during the cold war. He is sympathetic to prayer in schools. Winters claims that by renouncing such patently Catholic positions, Democrats became “the de facto party of secularism.”

But is that why they started losing? Or is it because they abandoned the communitarian spirit of the New Deal? Winters conjoins the word secular with liberal and elite, a way of making it a slur, but community values can just as easily have a secular underpinning as a theological one. In fact, the party’s string of presidential winners—F.D.R., Harry Truman, J.F.K., and Lyndon Johnson—were all nonreligious in their public personas, though none were amoral.

Kennedy’s secular approach still seems the only way to govern in a diverse society, at least if one hopes to avoid a religious war. Indeed, Winters himself barely admits the possibility of well-intentioned disagreement with Catholic positions. In the arguments of the abortion-rights lobby, for example, the author hears “echoes of anti-Catholic bigotry.” But this is akin to imposing a religious test on the rest of us—a dubious strategy for retaking the White House.