“What Matters In Selma”: Critics Are Completely Missing The Point
Ava DuVernay’s Selma is likely a top contender for the Academy Award for Best Picture. With its focus on the power of activism to force political and moral change, the highly praised film has the right message for our present moment of racial unrest. But not everyone is happy with the way it approaches history, and in particular, how it portrays President Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson “is devoid of any palpable conviction on voting rights. Vainglorious and power hungry, he unleashes his zealous pit bull, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, on King, who is determined to march in protest from Selma to Montgomery despite LBJ’s warning that it will be ‘open season’ on the protesters,” writes Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum director Mark K. Updegrove in a column for Politico magazine. “This characterization,” he continues, “flies in the face of history.”
Even harsher is former Johnson staffer Joseph A. Califano Jr., who accuses DuVernay of taking “trumped-up license with a true story that didn’t need any embellishment to work as a big-screen historical drama.” “In fact,” writes Califano, “Selma was LBJ’s idea.”
That’s a huge exaggeration. Activists had been organizing in Selma, Alabama, for at least two years before Martin Luther King Jr. met with Johnson, and weeks prior to his meeting with the president, King and his allies had decided on Selma as the site for new action and protests. By the time Johnson suggested something similar to King, the plan was already in motion.
But more than that, that entire line of criticism is misplaced. Selma isn’t a documentary or even a dramatized history. It is a film based on historical accounts, and like all films of its genre, it has a loose relationship to actual history. In Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, the investigation to solve the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, is transformed into a story of FBI heroes, one that ignores the role of local activists in bringing the killers to justice and doesn’t touch the bureau’s famous antagonism—under J. Edgar Hoover—toward the civil rights movement.
Just as egregious is the narrative of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, which shows a relentless Central Intelligence Agency—personified in Jessica Chastain as Maya—whose methods, including torture, lead to Osama Bin Laden and the military raid that killed him. The factual problem, as detailed in December’s Senate Intelligence Committee report, is that torture didn’t lead to unique intelligence. As such, it’s not clear that it helped find Bin Laden. But Bigelow made a choice to say otherwise, and in the context of the film, it’s defensible. Zero Dark Thirty—to my eyes at least—is less about the particulars of finding Bin Laden and more about the costs of obsession. What happens when you’re willing to give up everything for a single goal? What will you sacrifice? In this reading, torture is the moment when we—through Maya—commit to darkness in pursuit of our ends.
This is all to say that it’s wrong to treat nonfiction films—even biopics—as documentaries. Instead, it’s better to look at deviations from established history or known facts as creative choices—license in pursuit of art. As viewers, we should be less concerned with fact-checking and more interested in understanding the choices. Why did the director opt for this view and not a different one? If she omits and distorts, why? What is she trying to communicate?
It’s with these questions in mind that we should approach Selma. But first, we should look at how DuVernay actually presents Johnson (played by Tom Wilkinson) and his relationship with King (played by David Oyelowo).
At worst, DuVernay depicts Johnson and King as wary allies. In the film, Johnson agrees with King on the need for a Voting Rights Act, but he wants him to wait—Johnson has a Great Society to build—and warns that he doesn’t have the votes to push another civil rights bill on the heels of the 1964 Act, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations. It’s not that King and Johnson are enemies—they both want to dismantle Jim Crow—as much as they have different responsibilities and priorities. In order to act, Johnson needs a push. And King gives it to him.
Now, there’s a case that even this is unfair to Johnson. While it’s true he didn’t want to introduce a voting rights bill so soon after the Civil Rights Act of 1964—he needed votes for his economic program, and he didn’t want to alienate Southern Democrats—it’s also true that, in late 1964, Johnson told Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to write the “the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act you can devise.” This draft was written with help from Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, and was the basis for the bill the leaders introduced in March 1965. The Johnson of Selma, in other words, is much more reluctant than the Johnson of reality.
This is most clear in the scenes with Hoover (played by Dylan Baker), where Johnson allows the FBI director to harass King’s family with evidence of his infidelity. This is a far cry from real life. Yes, Johnson knew the contents of the FBI’s file on King, but there’s no evidence he conspired to smear him. That was a Hoover project, with no connection to Selma or the Voting Rights Act. Johnson may have been frustrated, but he wasn’t stupid, and attacking King would have only radicalized the movement, pushing it closer to its more militant activists. As much as King needed Johnson, Johnson needed King.
Which brings us back to our original question, arguably the only one you should ask of a movie that fictionalizes historical events: Why did the director make these choices? What is DuVernay trying to tell us when she makes Johnson more reluctant than he was, or when she shifts the timeline to give him a role in the FBI’s smear tapes? It’s possible these choices reflect ignorance, but I don’t think that’s right—Selma gets so much right about the period that it’s hard to believe DuVernay just didn’t know. It’s also possible they reflect malice, but again, Johnson isn’t the villain of the film—that distinction goes to Tim Roth’s (delightful) George Wallace, who doesn’t care that he’s on the “wrong side of history.”
If you need a clue, look at the people portrayed in the movie. If you don’t count Martin Sheen, who plays federal Judge Frank Minis Johnson Jr., Johnson and Wallace are the only politicians. Almost everyone else is an activist or an ordinary citizen: Carmen Ejogo’s Coretta Scott King, Lorraine Toussaint’s Amelia Boynton, Wendell Pierce’s Hosea Williams, Keith Stanfield’s Jimmie Lee Jackson, Stephan James’ John Lewis, Jeremy Strong’s James Reeb, André Holland’s Andrew Young, and many, many others.
Selma, simply put, is about the men and women who fought to put voting rights on the national agenda, and it engages history from their perspective. By hardening Johnson—and making him a larger roadblock than he was—DuVernay emphasizes the grass roots of the movement and the particular struggles of King and his allies. In the long argument of who matters most—activists or politicians—DuVernay falls on the side of the former, showing how citizens can expand the realm of the possible and give politicians the push—and the room—they need to act.
By those terms, Selma mostly succeeds. But there are flaws. “Except for a few scenes, we see little of the bravery Selma’s citizens displayed,” writes historian Gary May for the Daily Beast. “Annie Lee Cooper, well played by [Oprah] Winfrey, is shown trying but failing to register to vote. We are not told that Cooper had been able to vote without hindrance when she lived in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. But when she returned to Selma in 1962 to care for her aged mother, she lost that right.”
If Selma could have been better, it wasn’t because DuVernay didn’t do justice to Lyndon Johnson, but because there was so much to show about the ordinary people of Selma, and we—as viewers—don’t see it.
By: Jamelle Bouie, Slate, January 2, 2014
“No One Here Should Be Turning His Back”: Facing Each Other, Those On Each Side Might Be Surprised By What They See
Whom are police officers turning their backs on when they refuse to face Mayor Bill de Blasio, and whom are they protecting? On the night of Saturday, December 20th, after a man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot the officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, execution style, outside of a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing project, a line of officers who’d gathered at the Woodhull Medical Center faced away from the Mayor as he walked passed them. They were mourning and distraught; one might wish that they realized more fully that the city and its mayor were mourning with them, but it was the sort of act of shocked grief that can be forgiven the next day. That was more than a week ago, though. Since then, Patrick Lynch, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, a police union, all but called de Blasio the officers’ killer—he had “blood on his hands.” At Ramos’s funeral, held two days after Christmas, the officers in an overflow crowd outside the church turned their backs on the screen showing de Blasio giving his eulogy. Then, on Monday, at the graduation ceremony for the city’s police academy, members of the audience shouted “Traitor!” when de Blasio spoke, and there was scattered back-turning, though not, apparently, among the newest officers. De Blasio, in a speech that was almost abject, said, “You will confront all the problems that plague our society—problems that you didn’t create.” According to the Times, “a heckler yelled out ‘You did!’ and drew applause.”
But what, exactly, did de Blasio do? What was his “betrayal,” to borrow another of Lynch’s bitter phrases? After a grand jury failed to indict anyone in the death of Eric Garner, even though a video showed an officer putting him in what, by the N.Y.P.D.’s own rules, was an impermissible chokehold, de Blasio said that many in the city “did not want” that outcome. But he was less than explicit about what he wished, other than for any protests to be peaceful and, more generally, to not have to worry about how the police might deal with a child like his son Dante. Perhaps a fantasy mayor would have come out smiling following the news of the grand jury and presented it as a vindication. But what or whom would have been defended with a gesture like that? How would the city have been served by what whole communities would have experienced as scorn? (The Mayor may be the target here, but the message that members of the police will turn their backs on those who criticize them, excluding them from a circle of protection, is broad and unhelpful.) De Blasio promised, in his campaign, to do away with the N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk policies. A court case had already given him and the city good reason. Voters agreed, a source of tense confrontations was removed, and, in the year since, crime has fallen. He reacted defensively to criticism of his wife’s chief of staff, who, among other problems, had a boyfriend with a criminal record. Yet, at the same time, he brought in Bill Bratton, hardly a flaming radical, as his police commissioner.
Creating a space for peaceful, lawful protests is not what killed Ramos and Liu. The murderer was Brinsley, a lifetime petty criminal who didn’t even live in New York. Hours before the killings, he was in an apartment in Baltimore, pointing a gun at his girlfriend, Shaneka Thompson. He shot her in the abdomen; she survived, and he fled to Brooklyn. He posted an Instagram message saying “I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours … let’s take 2 of theirs.” At that point, he had already come close to putting “wings on” Shaneka Thompson, and any police officer in the country would have had good reason to arrest him in defense of a young, black woman. Brinsley added a “shootthepolice” hashtag and ones about Garner and Michael Brown; after news of the shooting, those words, his would-be excuses, were seen as explosive. They only are, though, if someone like Brinsley gets to decide what is “ours” and what is “theirs”—and who the us in “let’s” is. And he doesn’t. Ramos and Liu were ours; claiming them has nothing to do with race. Brinsley was nobody’s.
There is clearly anger toward de Blasio within the police force, as well as heartfelt dislike. It may be the legitimate result of a thousand acts of clumsiness and cultural blindness on the Mayor’s part. No matter the statistics, officers like Ramos and Liu, or Russel Timoshenko and Herman Yan, put their lives on the line. De Blasio is the mayor, and it is his job to form connections with people who have one of the hardest, most dangerous jobs in the city. Clearly he can do better, but it is also clear that he is trying. The police may feel left out, or that people don’t understand the hard work they have done—that new residents born in distant, safer places think they are the ones who’ve transformed Bushwick or Bed-Stuy, as if a peaceful city requires only artful curators, not custodians. For members of the police, suddenly places they didn’t want to patrol are places they can hardly afford to live on an officer’s salary. Their dismay may be understandable. But it should not be enraging. New York is a much safer city than it used to be, and that requires an adjustment by police officers, too. This may be where the N.Y.P.D.’s own leadership has failed. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association recently put a message on its Web site saying “Don’t let them insult your sacrifice!” It linked to a document that officers could sign asking de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito not to come to their funerals if they are killed in the line of duty, saying that it would be an “insult” due to their “consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve.” The statement is not a request to remove politics from funerals, but rather an effort to politicize them.
De Blasio did go to Ramos’s funeral—the insult would have been if he hadn’t. He spoke about Ramos’s love for his wife, Maritza (“the love of his life and the partner in all things”), and his sons, Justin and Jaden (“they are Mets fans. God bless them. And he loved playing basketball with his sons in Highland Park”). He added a few words in Spanish (“era un padre y esposo amoroso, un hombre de mucha fe”). Officer Ramos was studying to be a pastor, and Vice-President Joseph Biden, who also spoke at the funeral, said that he “didn’t just have a Bible in his locker; he lived it in his heart.” Wenjian Liu will be buried this coming weekend (the services were delayed to allow relatives to get here from China; that these two men are the ones Brinsley found randomly is a reflection of the N.Y.P.D.’s real diversity, as well as the city’s). Many of the officers outside were not New Yorkers; they had come from California, the United Kingdom, and places in between, and so it is hard to say what they knew about de Blasio when they made their act of protest, or what they knew about this city. They might answer that they knew what they needed to about being cops, and, sometimes, about being alone. That would be better expressed by moving toward people—the officers’ families, the communities they live in, even the Mayor—rather than showing their backs. The same could undoubtedly be said of some of those in the crowds that protested the grand jury’s verdict. Facing each other, those on each side might be surprised by what they see. The time for turning away is over.
By: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker, December 30, 2014
“Who Cares About Ideology?”: Why Jeb Bush Is Taking Big Risk In Pandering To Conservative Primary Voters
It’s never too early to start questioning the assumptions that guide presidential campaign coverage, whether they concern what candidates do and why they do it, what impact their decisions have, or how voters actually view the whole sordid extravaganza. And there are plenty of those just waiting to be unpacked and cast aside.
Today Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist writing for the New York Times, has what looks like some good news for Jeb Bush. She looks back at weekly polling data from 2012, and declares that if Mitt Romney moved to the right to win the primaries, the public seems not to have noticed. This might suggest that Bush — who has a couple of issue positions that conservative voters don’t like — is free to pander in the primaries to his heart’s content, without worrying about whether it might hurt him in the general election.
But I fear that Vavreck may be forgetting about a myth far more important than the one she’s trying to debunk. Before I explain, here’s the heart of her argument:
Because we have data every week, we can assess changes in average placements of the candidates over the course of the primaries and the general election. The data show that people’s views about the candidates’ ideologies didn’t move over the course of 2012. The lines are essentially flat.
For example, most people started and ended the election year believing, on average, that Mr. Romney was conservative, but not too much so. Any shifting, message-adjusting or pandering that Mr. Romney did during the primaries in 2012 did not hurt him in the general election by making him seem more conservative than he was earlier in the year, and it’s not at all clear it helped him in the primaries either. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, started the election year twice as far away from voters, on average, than Mr. Romney was and got farther away over the course of the year….
These three pieces of evidence — that Mr. Romney was thought to be no less conservative before the primaries than during or after them, that his average rating didn’t shift much at all during the entire year, and that he was ideologically closer to most voters than Mr. Obama — bust the myth that Republicans lost the 2012 election because of ideological shifts in the primaries.
This would appear to tell us that that Romney suffered not at all from his often comical attempts to pander to the Republican base in the primaries, and therefore such pandering poses no danger for Jeb Bush. But is that really true? To believe it, we’d have to believe that this poll question — asking voters to place a candidate on an ideological scale — captures the pandering phenomenon.
But there’s reason to believe it doesn’t. First of all, it’s possible that the pandering registered with many voters as something more like “Mitt Romney is running around telling people what they want to hear,” rather than “Mitt Romney is more conservative than he used to be.” It’s absolutely vital to remember that most Americans are not like those of us who care deeply about politics. Because politics isn’t something they think too much about, they don’t necessarily have a firm grip on even some of the most basic distinctions between the parties. Many don’t even know what it means for one candidate to be a “liberal” and another to be a “conservative.”
That may sound like an elitist thing to say, but it’s true. The National Election Studies has been asking respondents for many years which is the more conservative party. In recent years about two-thirds have been able to provide the right answer, which is actually an improvement over the 1980′s and 1990′s, when barely half could tell you. Think about that for a moment: a full third of Americans don’t know which is the “conservative” party.
It’s also vital to remember that when you look at all of them together, the public always perceives the Democratic presidential candidate to be farther to the left than the Republican candidate is to the right when they’re forced to answer the question. This is a phenomenon driven almost entirely by Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, who tend to describe the Democratic candidate as an extreme liberal, almost irrespective of who he actually is. The more partisan loyalties harden, the clearer the effect becomes. Here’s an excerpt from a 2003 article I wrote in my former life as an academic, citing NES data:
Republicans always perceive the Democratic candidate as much more liberal than Democrats and independents perceive him to be. Bill Clinton is the clearest case: while Democrats and independents placed him at about the same ideological position as most other Democratic candidates, in 1996 strong Republicans thought Bill Clinton was more liberal than previous strong Republicans had found Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, and even George McGovern.
That’s obviously not a judgment based in some kind of rational assessment of what a candidate stands for. More recently, you can see the phenomenon in this Gallup poll from the 2012 primaries. Democrats, Republicans, and independents all rated the Republican candidates about the same on an ideological scale, but Republicans saw Barack Obama as being far, far more liberal than Democrats or independents saw him. That ends up pulling the candidate’s overall rating toward the perception of Republicans. So when Vavreck tells us that Barack Obama was perceived as farther from voters ideologically than Mitt Romney was, she’s actually describing an old phenomenon that tells us little about what actually happened in 2012.
What’s the lesson here if you’re Jeb Bush — or, for that matter, some other Republican who feels the need to genuflect before conservative primary voters? It isn’t that pandering will have no cost. Wherever they put Mitt Romney on an ideological scale, voters rated him as less honest and trustworthy than Barack Obama, and his performance in the primaries probably had something to do with that. The lesson is probably that “ideology,” at least as political junkies understand it, is something that doesn’t matter all that much to most voters.
They aren’t going to say, “Well, I thought he was a 2.4 on the ideology scale, but I’ve concluded that he’s actually a 3.1, so I’m voting against him.” If Jeb Bush can pander and shift about ideologically while still convincing voters he’s a man of principle who can be trusted — no easy task — then if nothing else he’ll have one less thing to worry about. But if he can’t, then he’s much more likely to wind up like Mitt Romney.
- By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 2, 2015
“Austerity’s End Strengthens U.S. Recovery”: Speechless, Republicans Fall Back To Peddling More Nonsense
For a variety of partisan and ideological reasons, the right finds it necessary to believe austerity helps the economy. Conservatives, on Capitol Hill and off, remain wedded to the idea that taking capital out of the economy and weakening demand will lead to more growth, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
In an amusing twist, as the U.S. economic recovery gains strength, some on the right actually feel vindicated.
Grover Norquist would like Republicans to shut up about how bad the economy is, and instead take credit for the recovery.
The prominent anti-tax crusader hasn’t turned into a bullhorn for President Barack Obama’s economic policies; he still thinks they’re a drag on jobs and wages. But he’s also grown critical of his fellow Republicans for making poor strategic and messaging decisions on several key issues. Rather than tying the economic recovery to spending cuts ushered in by the sequester and to the continuation of 85 percent of the Bush tax cuts, he said, some in the party have insisted their own leaders fumbled those items.
It’s an interesting course correction for the right. In recent years, Republicans have said the combination of the Affordable Care Act, federal regulations, and higher taxes on the wealthy are crushing the economy. That argument obviously doesn’t make any sense in light of the strongest growth and job creation in over a decade.
So Norquist is suggesting his party flip the script: sure the economy is starting to soar, he says, but that’s only because deep spending cuts like “the sequester” gave the nation a big boost. Austerity took capital out of the system, some conservatives are now arguing, and just look at how great the results are!
It’s important to understand the degree to which Norquist has the story backwards. Recent developments haven’t bolstered conservative economic theories; they’ve done the opposite.
First, the national economy hasn’t improved as a result of spending cuts, but rather, the end of spending cuts.
For a long stretch, government spending cutbacks at all levels were a substantial drag on economic growth. Now, finally, relief is in sight. For the first time since 2011, local, state and federal governments are providing a small but significant increase to prosperity. […]
Across the nation, state and local governments, Democratic and Republican alike, are spending on projects that were stalled. Teachers, who were laid off in droves in recent years, are being hired again. Even federal spending in some sectors is on the rise.
The more the public sector starts to reinvest, as opposed to scaling back, the stronger economic growth becomes. This is the polar opposite of Republican economic theory, and yet, the laws of supply and demand don’t much care about politicians’ ideology.
Second, as Danny Vinik explained, “one of the big reasons that the economy kicked into gear in the latter half of this year is that the Murray-Ryan budget deal alleviated much of sequestration. Fiscal policy, finally, is largely not standing in the way of stronger growth.”
Paul Krugman last week seemed to anticipate Norquist’s argument, and preemptively destroyed it.
Suppose that for some reason you decided to start hitting yourself in the head, repeatedly, with a baseball bat. You’d feel pretty bad. Correspondingly, you’d probably feel a lot better if and when you finally stopped. What would that improvement in your condition tell you?
It certainly wouldn’t imply that hitting yourself in the head was a good idea. It would, however, be an indication that the pain you were experiencing wasn’t a reflection of anything fundamentally wrong with your health. Your head wasn’t hurting because you were sick; it was hurting because you kept hitting it with that baseball bat.
And now you understand the basics of what has been happening to several major economies, including the United States, over the past few years. In fact, you understand these basics better than many politicians and commentators. […]
[I]n America we haven’t had an official, declared policy of fiscal austerity – but we’ve nonetheless had plenty of austerity in practice, thanks to the federal sequester and sharp cuts by state and local governments. The good news is that we, too, seem to have stopped tightening the screws: Public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. And the economy is doing much better as a result.
I can appreciate the dilemma facing Norquist and his allies when it comes to explaining the sudden economic surge. Indeed, after the strongest economic growth in 11 years, Republicans greeted the news with total silence – literally.
And if I were in their shoes, I’d probably be speechless, too. But that’s no excuse for peddling nonsense – those hoping to credit austerity for a healthy recovery clearly have no idea what they’re talking about.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 2, 2014
“The Changing Role Of Money In Politics”: An Electoral Landscape In Which Financial Balance Has Tilted Dramatically To The Ultra-Rich
The 2012 presidential election was the first to be held in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United. Too many of us have forgotten that the results of that election were the opposite of what the megadonors had hoped for.
Can’t buy me gov.
That line neatly sums up the dismal showing on Election Day for the fundraisers, super-PAC strategists, and big-dollar donors of the Republican Party. Outside groups spent north of $1 billion this campaign season—bankrolled mostly by a small cadre of wealthy contributors—and yet they and their funders, especially on the Republican side, were left with little to show for it when the sun rose Wednesday morning. The GOP’s flagship super-PAC, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, had an abysmal 1 percent return on its $104 million investment. Megadonor Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, invested $57 million in 2012 races; only 42 percent of the candidates who received Adelson support won. Other big donors—say, Romney super-PAC backers—got nothing for their money.
Perhaps we forgot about all of that because the 2014 midterms turned a lot of it around (with a few exceptions, i.e., Eric Cantor).
The 100 biggest campaign donors gave $323 million in 2014 — almost as much as the $356 million given by the estimated 4.75 million people who gave $200 or less…
And the balance almost certainly would tip far in favor of the mega-donors were the analysis to include nonprofit groups that spent at least $219 million — and likely much more — but aren’t required to reveal their donors’ identities.
The numbers — gleaned from reports filed with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service — paint the most comprehensive picture to date of an electoral landscape in which the financial balance has tilted dramatically to the ultra-rich. They have taken advantage of a spate of recent federal court rulings, regulatory decisions and feeble or bumbling oversight to spend ever-greater sums in politics — sometimes raising questions about whether their bounty is being well spent…
Taken together, the trend lines reflect a new political reality in which a handful of superaffluent partisans can exert more sway over the campaign landscape than millions of donors of more average means.
With sweeping victories for the Republicans these megadonors financed, it appears as though that success overshadows their previous failure in 2012 to influence the election outcome.
But it does raise a couple of questions: Are megadonors more effective at influencing midterms than presidential elections? And if so, why? One possible answer to those questions comes from turning our gaze away from who gives the money in order to focus for a moment on how it is spent.
Over the last few decades, as the amount of money in politics has exploded, the vast majority of those dollars have been spent on media – particularly television advertisements. Recently we’ve been learning more about what audience those ads reach. Derek Thompson reported it this way: Half of Broadcast TV Viewers Are 54 and Older – Yikes. As Cecilia Kang pointed out, younger viewers are trending away from traditional television in favor of subscription-based channels and streaming options.
And so it should probably not come as a surprise that a midterm election focused on turning out older voters in local elections is more fertile ground for expensive television advertising.
It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the 2016 presidential election. I would simply note that all of Karl Rove’s millions of dollars in TV advertising were no match in 2012 to a simple recording by a catering staff at Mitt Romney’s famous 47% event. In the meantime, the Democrat’s largest megadonor – George Soros – has “shifted his giving away from pure politics, preferring to fund causes devoted to building up progressive infrastructure.”
At least until the laws are changed, megadonors are legally able to use their millions of dollars in an attempt to influence elections. The question will increasingly be…what do they spend it on?
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 3, 2015
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