“Citizens United And New Media Are On A Collision Course”: New Technology Has Potential To Deal A Blow To Big Money In Politics
New media is challenging the basic business model of advertisements as a way to pay for television programming. First came remote controls and options like Tivo, which allowed viewers to skip ads. Now, in the age of digital streaming, the number of households that are “cord cutters” (no cable or satellite television service) has increased 60% in the last 5 years.
This evolution comes just as the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United allowed for unlimited contributions to campaign super pacs – whose main role has been to pay for expensive television advertising. The conflation of those two developments might help explain why Jeb Bush’s super pac has spent over $15 million on television ads (far more than any other campaign), and yet their candidate has dropped to fifth place in the polls, leading long-time Bush family friend John Sununu to say, “I have no feeling for the electorate anymore. It’s not responding the way it used to.”
We essentially saw the same thing in the 2012 election when Karl Rove’s super pacs had a 1% return on their investment in television ads, while a video recorded by a waiter at a Romney event was likely a game-changer. At some point super pacs are going to have to ask themselves what they should be spending all those millions of dollars on if television advertising doesn’t move the needle on poll numbers, while free media becomes a determining factor.
It’s also interesting to note that a candidate like Donald Trump has spent very little money so far and recently swore off having any super pacs. The reason he’s been able to do that is because he gets a tremendous amount of free media for saying outrageous things. That poses it’s own kind of danger as long as the press prioritizes the sensational over the substantive. But in the end, it is not significantly different from all the free media the Obama campaign got with the video of Romney’s “47%” remarks in 2012.
The one Republican candidate whose super pacs are experimenting more aggressively with the use of new media is Ted Cruz. Kellyanne Conway, who runs one of the Cruz super pacs, recently said that their goal was to be “more surgical, spending on digital, cable, direct mail, radio, in addition to TV.”
Brian Fisher, who runs an organization called “Online for Life” (which has developed apps and social media to connect with women seeking to end a pregnancy), has formed a company called Red Metrics LLC that will serve as the data and digital operation for Cruz’s four Keep the Promise super pacs. One of the visible results of that collaboration is the Facebook page: Reigniting the Promise, which already has over 380,000 followers.
To date, the Cruz super pacs have spent almost nothing on television ads, and yet their candidate is inching up in the polls and his campaign has raised more “hard money” than anyone in the Republican field except Ben Carson. Whether or not Cruz has a chance at actually being the nominee remains to be seen. But when you compare the results of super pac spending on new media vs paid television advertising, it is obvious that there is a new game in town.
It is always important to remember that the role of money in politics is to influence voters. As long as super pacs continue to spend their money on something that doesn’t have much impact on them (estimates are that they’ll spend $4.4 billion on TV ads this election cycle), the concern about the wealthy being able to control our elections is muted.
On the other hand, just as new media is having an impact on the music, entertainment and publishing industries, it is also affecting political campaigns. As we’ve seen with those other industries, new media is inherently more democratic and less expensive. That puts it on a bit of a collision course with the big money that is flooding into super pacs.
New media is clearly here to stay. While mega-donors and their super pacs will catch on to that fact some day and make adjustments, it is time to begin asking ourselves whether or not this new technology has the potential to deal a definitive blow to the role of big money in politics.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 1, 2015
“Will Jeb Hold His Fire On Rubio?”: It May Simply Be Too Late For Team Bush To Do Anything At All
When the Bush family is your friend:
On the night of the 2010 midterm elections, a portly, silver-haired Jeb Bush stood on a stage in the courtyard of Miami’s luxe Biltmore Hotel, appearing to choke back tears. The beloved former governor of Florida was there to introduce the young conservative insurgent who had just pulled off a remarkable underdog victory in the U.S. Senate race.
“Bushes get emotional, so I’m gonna try my hardest,” Jeb told the ecstatic crowd of Republicans. “My wife told me, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’ But Marco Rubio makes me cry for joy!”
At the time, it looked like the culmination of a sturdy alliance and deep friendship — the proud mentor presenting his protege.
When the Bush family is not your friend:
Meanwhile, in a series of off-the-record conversations, Jeb’s messengers tried to convince a number of influential figures in political media that they had the goods on Rubio. Among these was MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. A former Republican congressman from Florida who remained tapped into the state’s politics, Scarborough was skeptical whenever somebody tried to convince him that Rubio had an explosive career-ending secret lurking in his past.
“Everybody who runs against him says he has girlfriends, or financial problems. They throw a lot of shit at the wall,” Scarborough told me. “It’s the same thing from the Jeb Bush camp. They keep telling me, ‘Oh, we’ve got the thing that’s going to take him down.’ But nobody’s ever produced anything that we all haven’t read in the Tallahassee Democrat.”
Back in October 2004, Richard Gooding did a deep-dive for Vanity Fair on how the Bush machine had trashed John McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary. It’s the kind of piece that merits an occasional re-reading, especially whenever there’s a Bush running for president, which seems to be most of the time.
There appears to be no doubt that Team Jeb is prepared for a repeat performance and that Marco Rubio is their target. Round One was during the early fundraising/endorsement phase of the campaign. Round Two is coming up shortly.
Yet, it may be too little, too late. Politico reports that Republican senators are so concerned about Ted Cruz that they’re beginning to coalesce behind Rubio. This is basically an acknowledgment that Jeb simply has no juice and is never going to rise out of his doldrums. In fact, Jeb may find that there’s no appetite for the Phase Two attack on Rubio from the Republican Establishment because they now see Rubio as their last opportunity to avoid a catastrophic situation where their nominee comes from the Trump/Carson/Cruz camp.
Trump and Carson are seen as unfit for the office of the presidency, and Cruz is simply loathed. All three of them are considered poor general election candidates who have the potential to put the GOP’s congressional majorities (especially the Senate) at risk.
If Jeb’s minions go out there floating rumors that Marco Rubio has a secret family and a bushel of mistresses, that’s not going to fly. It would be one thing if this were going to work for Bush, but the latest Quinnipiac poll out of Iowa has him at four percent. I mean, even the moribund Rand Paul campaign is at five percent.
If the Bushes tear down Rubio without rising themselves, there’s no one left to stop the barbarians at the gates of the Republican National Convention.
It may simply be too late for Team Bush to do anything at all about their situation. Assuming, that is, that they want to retain any good will with the Republican Establishment at all.
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 30, 2015
“But Is It Too Late?”: The GOP Is Finally Emerging From Trump Denialism
The contours of the outsider-as-favorite Republican primary began to take shape this summer, when the candidates without establishment support, led by Donald Trump, consolidated half of the vote in national polls.
The news for GOP elites has grown consistently worse since then. And only now, as those contours stretch far enough to squeeze the establishment entirely out of contention, are the party faithful emerging from their state of Trump denial. They’re beginning to reckon publicly with the calamity of this campaign, and are grasping to reassert control over the process. The only questions now are whether they’re too late, and whether they can defeat Trumpism without acknowledging and atoning for their complicity in his ascent.
A few months ago, Trump and his fellow outsiders were a clear threat to the party, but it took several of them—Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina—to amass 50 percent support, with Trump contributing the lion’s share.
Today, they eclipse it easily. In some early-state polls, Trump and Ted Cruz alone enjoy the support of more than half of all likely voters, while the outsiders combined enjoy the support of more than two thirds of all respondents.
This presents the GOP with a new nightmare scenario. Earlier in the year, Republicans could take solace in the likelihood that the field of elected officials would winnow and that the party would coalesce around a single alternative to the insurgents as it did in 2008 and 2012. They were sure it would come down to a frontrunner against two or three formidable conservative challengers who were splitting the activist vote among themselves.
That winnowing hasn’t happened. And now, if and when it does, it’s conceivable that the combined forces of the party will only be able to marshal about one-third or less of the overall vote—not enough to guarantee victory even if Trump and Cruz battle it out beyond Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. And even that assumes supporters of candidates like Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie don’t defect to Cruz or Trump instead of Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush.
Whether motivated by this particular analysis or not, party elites are snapping to attention. John Kasich’s SuperPAC is promising a multi-million-dollar anti-Trump blitz. A more concerted effort, spearheaded by GOP operative Liz Mair, is called Trump Card LLC, and operates on the premise that “unless something dramatic and unconventional is done, Trump will be the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton will become president.”
Prominent surrogates for leading candidates have embraced the notion, first propounded by liberals, that Trump is a “fascist.” But the principals they back won’t go near the term. Some, like Rubio and Cruz, won’t criticize Trump at all, and Cruz in particular is a Trump sycophant—“a big fan.” Which raises the question of whether a party that enables Trump and Trumpism can effectively root out either.
Michael Gerson, a former George W. Bush aide who now writes an opinion column for the Washington Post, acknowledged that “Trump has, so far, set the terms of the primary debate and dragged other candidates in the direction of ethnic and religious exclusion. One effect has been the legitimization of even more extreme views—signaling that it is okay to give voice to sentiments and attitudes that, in previous times, people would have been too embarrassed to share in public.”
With the denial fading, Gerson asks, “Is it possible, and morally permissible, for economic and foreign policy conservatives, and for Republicans motivated by their faith, to share a coalition with the advocates of an increasingly raw and repugnant nativism?”
The answer appears to be “yes.” As much as they want Trump vanquished, the problem for the other Republicans in the field is that they’ve all pledged to back the GOP nominee, no matter who wins. John McCain, a man of the party who nevertheless agreed to place Sarah Palin in line for the presidency, says he will support Trump if faced with a choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
That’s not the Breitbart crew talking. It’s the RNC, the entire primary field, and one of the party’s most recent presidential nominees. Which is why when writers like National Review’s Kevin Williamson lay the blame for Trump’s ascent at the feet of conservative movement jesters Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, and shrug that nothing can be done—“as a matter of culture, Trump is—unhappily—right where a great many conservatives are: angry, sputtering, lashing out. Trump may not last; Trumpism will.”—it rings hollow.
As much as they’ve awakened to the threat that Trumpism poses to their party, Republicans and the conservative intelligentsia lack the self-awareness—or perhaps the temerity—to acknowledge that though they now resent it, they’ve been courting it all along.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, November 25, 2015
“Europe The Unready”: Europe’s Ability To Protect Itself Turns Out To Have Been Undermined By Its Imperfect Union
Thanksgiving as we know it dates not to colonial days but to the middle of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln made it a federal holiday. It is, in other words, a celebration of national unity. And our national unity is indeed something to be thankful for.
To see why, consider the slow-motion disaster now overtaking the European project on multiple fronts.
For those not familiar with the term, the “European project” has a very specific meaning. It refers to the long-term effort to foster a peaceful, prosperous Europe through ever-closer economic and social integration, an effort that began more than 60 years ago with the formation of the Coal and Steel Community.
The effort continued with the creation of the Common Market in 1959; the expansion of that market to include newly democratic nations in southern Europe; the Single European Act, assuring free movement of people as well as goods; further extension of the European Union to former Communist nations; the Schengen agreement, which removed many border controls within the continent; and, of course, the creation of a common European currency.
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One way to think about all these moves is that they were attempts to give Europe many of the attributes of a single nation without formal political union — at least not yet. The more or less explicit hope of many in the European elite was that technical and economic integration would gradually foster psychological unification, and eventually pave the way for a United States of Europe.
And for a long time the project worked very well, as Europe grew steadily more prosperous, peaceful, and free. But how would the process deal with setbacks? After all, the European project was creating ever-growing interdependence without creating either the institutions or, despite elite hopes, the sense of political legitimacy that would be needed to manage that interdependence if things went wrong.
Which brings me to the disasters.
At first sight, the financial crisis, the refugee crisis, and the terrorist attacks might not seem to have anything in common. But in each case Europe’s ability to protect itself turns out to have been undermined by its imperfect union.
On the financial crisis: There’s widespread consensus among economists (though not, alas, among politicians) that Europe’s woes were mainly caused by mood swings among private investors, who recklessly poured money into southern Europe after the creation of the euro, then abruptly reversed course a decade later. Yet something similar happened in America, too, where money first poured into mortgage lending in the “sand states” — Florida, Arizona, Nevada, California — then took flight. In the U.S., however, the pain of that reversal was limited by federal institutions, ranging from Social Security to deposit insurance. In Europe, unfortunately, the cost of bank bailouts and much more fell on national governments, so that private-sector overreach soon spilled over into fiscal crisis.
On refugees: the politics of immigration in general, and refugees in particular, are nasty everywhere — just listen to Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. But Europe is also trying to maintain open internal borders while leaving the management of external borders to national governments like that of impoverished, austerity-ravaged Greece. No wonder, then, that border controls are making a comeback.
And on terrorism: No free society can ever be perfectly secure from attack. But think about how much harder it gets when anti-terrorism is pretty much left up to national governments, whose capacity for policing varies greatly. Imagine how New Yorkers would feel if political paralysis in New Jersey were getting in the way of any effective anti-terrorist policy there, and you have a good idea of the problems Belgium has created for France.
Ideally, Europe would respond to these setbacks by strengthening its union, creating more of the institutions it needs to manage interdependence. But the political will for that kind of move forward seems lacking, even for the most obvious steps. For example, on Tuesday the European Commission proposed the gradual phase-in of a Europe-wide system of deposit insurance, which is the bare minimum needed to maintain stable banks within a currency union. Yet the plan faces furious opposition within Germany, which sees it as a giveaway to its spendthrift neighbors.
The alternative is to take a step back, which is already happening on border controls. European leaders are, rightly, concerned that each such move damages the whole European project. But what is the realistic alternative?
The truth is that I don’t know the answer. I’m just thankful that America has the kind of unity Europe can only dream of — at least for now. I guess we’ll see what’s left after President Trump gets done with it.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, November 27, 2015
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