Buying Elections... Like Shopping At Saks

Matt Miller's just filled with sober infatuation for New York Republican/billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg, who's taken to masquerading as an "indie." Miller, an archetypal and unabashed toadie, worships wealthy people and people in power. I believe he works for Bloomberg TV as well. He's been telling people that what this country needs now is a rich person to run the show-- not some piddling multimillionaire but someone who is really rich. Funny, my own instinct is that those people should be rounded up and shot before they can do any more damage to society. To each his own. Miller would like to see Bloomberg run for president for a bunch of childish, fatuous reasons not worth repeating.

Most of the biggest self-funders in the latest election cycle-- Florida gangster Rick Scott excluded-- lost their races. Voters are more discerning about the super-wealthy and their self-proclaimed worthiness than Miller (except in Florida). Yesterday's post dealt with the rich bitches-- NutMeg, Carly and Linda McMahon, the wrestler lady from Connecticut-- apparently so that Scott wouldn't muck up the narrative with his win. They all made bundles in business and tried buying their way into the U.S. Senate, a tradition for the stinking rich that goes back to the beginning of time.

Meg Whitman was hardly a household name when she commenced her run. Now she is-- and one that is really disliked. The more TV and radio and internet ads she ran, the more people started detesting her. By the end of the campaign they hated her so much that it was hard to believe that people started saying how they disliked Carly Fiorina even more. Imagine what Whitman could have done to win widespread social approval and admiration with even half of the $143 million she spent on the failed campaign! (She lost by almost a million votes out of seven million cast.) Perhaps if she had deployed $70 million helping the needy, she could have used the other half to win in the following cycle. I guess she was in a rush.

McMahon only spent $50 million of her own and, a real cheapskate, Fiorina only put up $7 million of the money she looted from Hewlett-Packard before she was unceremoniously fired as the worst chief executive of any major company in recent memory. Although the Post insists these three are "savvy," "sharp" and "successful," people who have dealt with them haven't been so kind. But the Post wants to know why each failed so spectacularly despite how absolutely fabulous they insist each is.

"It's in some ways like a highly underdeveloped country that suddenly strikes oil and they don't know what to do with the money and start spending it unwisely," said Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. Baker said that money is a threshold requirement in politics, "but above a certain amount you don't get a dividend for every extra dollar."

"And when it's your own money, you cast aside some of the restraints and keep spending, to the point where you cast aside certain other aspects of the campaign that might be deficient."

Whitman was the shakiest campaign presence of the three, and a colossal ad campaign could not correct that. Awkward on the trail and hounded by embarrassing reports that she had failed to vote most of her adult life and that her housekeeper was an illegal immigrant, she hired expensive media consultants, including chief strategist Mike Murphy, who made hundreds of thousands of dollars of Whitman's money and financed an onslaught of on-air ads that targeted women, Latinos and other traditionally Democratic constituencies. But the millions she spent to boost her appeal seemed to have the opposite result, as her likeability dropped below where it had been when she started.

...[T]here was plenty to second-guess in Fiorina's inability to drift back to the center after her sharp tack right in the primary. In contrast to most centrist California candidates, Fiorina stuck to her opposition to abortion except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother's life; touted the benefits of offshore drilling; and championed gun rights.

Boxer pounced on Fiorina's positions on social issues and constantly linked the Republican to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who endorsed the GOP challenger.

And in a brutal economy, Boxer incessantly excoriated Fiorina's record at Hewlett-Packard of sending jobs overseas. Democrats sought to cast Whitman and Fiorina as one in the same: Silicon Valley executives who were trying to buy the election. Boxer, who had raised plenty of money in her own right, made sure California's television viewers got the message, and it clearly resonated.

"These women are trying to buy the election as if it's their birthright," chef Mark Peel, 55, said as he sat in the Tar Pit, an elegant Art Deco cocktail bar in West Hollywood.

Doug Kottler, a 45-year-old lawyer walking through The Grove in Los Angeles, agreed: "What's refreshing is that the election couldn't be bought."

Kottler said he did distinguish between the two California businesswomen, although that hardly helped them. "I just looked at them and said 'Ugh' and 'Ugh,' " said Kottler, who added that he planned to vote the Democratic line the next day. "They didn't need to bring each other down. They were both in their own freefalls."

On the other side of the country, McMahon seemed to have an even stronger chance of filling Sen. Christopher J. Dodd's seat. "I am an outsider-- I am not a career politician," she said in February. "What I hear over and over and over again is, 'We want somebody with real-life business experience.' "

Ultimately though, Connecticut voters rejected the notion that her business experience had much to do with real life. She emphasized the "corporate skills" and not the "soap opera" quality of wrestling, but exit polls by Edison Research showed that the unsavory wrestling aura stuck. Half of voters polled said that the wrestling association weighed on their vote, and almost all of them-- four out of five-- said it made them unlikely to send her to Washington.

For all the obvious attention to the onstage antics, it was, to a certain extent, the real-world business experience that brought McMahon down. Just as attacks of heartless labor cuts hurt Fiorina and Whitman in California, Blumenthal pointed to her decision to send pink slips to 10 percent of World Wrestling Entertainment's workers.

I think I would have found the Post's story more compelling if it had dealt with all the multimillionaires who ran and how their wealth impacted their races, not just the three sadsack ladies. For although McMahon holds the record for dollars spent per vote ($95-- a bargain compared to her $454 spent per primary vote) and NutMeg was #2 with $57 spent per vote, #3 was Rick Scott, who spent $29 of the money he ripped off from Medicare scams per vote he received from Florida voters who didn't seem to care where he stole his money). #4 was that Ganley guy-- who spent $29 per vote, losing badly to Betty Sutton, after it was revealed that he had tried to rape several female campaign volunteers.Like Ganley, Scott Rigel is also a used car salesman and like Ganley he spent lavishly on his campaign, coming in at #5-- $28 per vote, and beating Blue Dog Glenn Nye in Virginia's second CD. None of this answers the question how, for example, did a bona fide nitwit, Ron Johnson, who actually makes the three female kooks look good, manage to use his money to defeat one of the most admired political figures in America, Senate icon Russ Feingold? And Rick Scott? Like I said, a notorious-- if unindicted-- criminal? Why did those two make it and the three free-spending gals fail? Is sexism part of the picture here?