REPUBLICANS RECRUITING VERY RICH PEOPLE TO RUN FOR CONGRESS-- THAT ISN'T NEW OR NEWS AND IT'S ONLY HALF THE STORY

This morning's NY Times has a disturbing a story in the "Politics" section entitled Short of Money, G.O.P. Enlists Rich Candidates. It's disturbing because it's somewhat misleading. First of all, the Republican Party always enlists rich candidates and, lately, so does this shameful Inside-the-Beltway crew controlling the Democratic congressional caucus. For the Times to ballyhoo it like this implies it is something new and/or unique. What is new and unique is that the Republicans are "confronting an enormous fund-raising gap with Democrats." Normally-- especially in the last couple of decades-- the Republicans have managed to scoop up all the technically legalized corporate bribes. But this year they've been out Republicaned by an unscrupulous insider who's very much at home playing by Tom Delay Rules: Rahm Emanuel, the new darling of the K Street lobbyists.

That the Republicans are "aggressively recruiting wealthy candidates who can spend large sums of their own money to finance their Congressional races" is so far from "news" that it would be laughable-- if it wasn't so tragic. Approximately half the members of the Senate are millionaires (as opposed to just under 1% of Americans). The estimate is that the House has a somewhat smaller percentage of millionaires-- by not be much. And both parties are complicit.

In 2002 Common Dreams published a piece showing that around half the incoming congressional freshmen were millionaires. It's gone straight downhill since then-- downhill meaning that members of Congress have less and less in common with regular Americans. "Close to half the incoming members of Congress," the story begins, "are millionaires and many will face votes that could affect their financial holdings." A significant number of freshmen that year had significant investments in banking and credit companies-- the year a horrendous new bankruptcy bill written by the credit industry was passed-- as well as in Big Pharma, oil and energy companies, etc.

Government watchdog groups often cite the economic inequity between many members of Congress and the people they represent. They say wealth makes lawmakers more apt to think about their financial interests than what's best for their constituents.

"Only richer people tend to win office," said Gary Ruskin, director of the Congressional Accountability Project, which is affiliated with consumer advocate Ralph Nader. "It's those very same people who tend to hold lots of stock. They have conflicts of interest in respect to their voting when they come to office."

And one of those 2002 freshmen millionaires has had the most pernicious effect of all, DWT's favorite villain, Rahm Emanuel who "reported $6.9 million in salary last year, primarily from investment banking, according to his financial disclosure form."

The income chasm between members of Congress and that of ordinary Americans is a primary reason why so many working class people have dropped out of the political process. They know that the ‘appearance’ of choice in political races is little more than an illusion of choice. So vast are the sums of money needed to run a major political campaign today that only the wealthiest people can afford to run. This leaves ninety-nine percent of the population out in the cold. The situation underscores why we need to get the special interest money out of politics. The playing field can be leveled and integrity restored to the process through publicly financed campaigns. By publicly funding political campaigns all of the candidates would have equal funding. The wealthy would have no special advantage. Working class Americans could reenter the political process and have a real chance of winning elections and thus gaining representation.

The result of having too many wealthy people in office is having calamitous impacts on America’s working class families-- the backbone of our society. It has resulted in the breakdown of the family unit. Wealthy people are likely to look out for their own financial interests rather than the welfare of society, especially the poor. This form of government excludes the vast majority of the citizenry from the process and leaves them utterly without representation. It leaves them alone and vulnerable to predation by the rich.

Owing to the huge sums of money needed to run viable political campaigns, the wealthy are heavily recruited to run for office. The wealthy can afford to self finance their campaigns-- the poor cannot. Thus they enjoy enormous advantages over those without money.

Recruiting the wealthy has been a common practice for Republicans for a very long tome; they are, after all, like all parties of the right, primarily concerned with one thing and one thing only: conserving the economic and social status quo. The parties of the right-- including in this country the GOP-- exist to represent the interests of the wealthy. It is a relatively new phenomena for Democratic, traditionally the party of working and middle class Americans, to also become a party primarily controlled by the wealthy and willing to safeguard and promote their interests. This has accelerated gigantically with the advent and rise to power of Emanuel and others like him or under his sway.

The silly Times story today babbles on about this Republican millionaire and that Republican millionaire "investing" hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money into their campaigns. "But Democrats, who have been closely monitoring the Republican millionaires, assert that the recruiting underscores the Republicans’ financial weakness since they lost control of Congress in 2006." Neither those Democrats, nor the writer of the piece, thinks to mention trends among Democrats in recruiting millionaires.

As part of my function at Blue America I talk with lots and lots of Democratic candidates-- and often not the millionaires, the ones who are discouraged by the Insiders for not being a millionaire and yet daring to run for office. If you get a dozen paragraphs into the story you find this:

Self-financed, deep-pocketed Congressional candidates are nothing new for either party, and the Democrats have their own share for 2008. But the Democrats do not have a concerted campaign to find such candidates, they say, while the Republicans describe the recruitment of these candidates as central to their plan for the 2008 elections.

Is the writer fresh out of high school? Or did he graduate with a nice gentleman's C from a mediocre journalism school. "The Democrats do not have a concerted campaign to find such candidates, they say." Thank you... And? Is what they say true? Do the writer check the facts and figures? Last year Emanuel recruited millionaire "ex" Republicans to run (as putative Democrats), such as Tim Mahoney and Christine Jennings, against middle class actual Democrats. This year he has found himself a conservative Blue Dog millionaire Bill Foster to run against a union carpenter, John Laesch, in IL-14. The Times story even mentions the district-- but only in terms of the GOP multimillionaire candidate, Jim Oberweis, not even acknowledging Emanuel's own recruitment in the same district.