I am absolutely furious with the people running the Republican campaign organizations and the annoying WinRed that does the charges. My mailbox is perpetually flooded with email several times a day. There are literally a dozen or more from Donald Trump alone. Then there is everyone else running for office because the congressional campaign committees gave out my email.
I of course I finally took steps to stop this by telling them remove me from their lists but then they simply shifted over to another mailing list and were back again. This goes on continuously even though the next election is still almost a year away, due to the permanent campaign we have to endure. Worse, some of the wording is downright offensive for failing to respond. They have also cried wolf too many times, always falsely claiming they are behind in fundraising.
As a result I sometimes miss important mail like notices and bills, etc. because of the nonstop flood. What I am going to have to do is make a new mailbox just for bills and other important things. Mind you it’s no secret I have been a lifelong conservative, but I have had it with this. I just don’t know what they think they are accomplishing by annoying people this way.
I’m even getting mail from the Democrats now due to a publication giving out my address! A good part of the reason for all of this is tunnel vision, that is more and more ubiquitous across the board in today’s society. By that I mean the organizations are now so laser-focused on particular objectives that the staff pull out all the stops to try and achieve them without any consideration of collateral consequences. The campaign people want to raise as much money as they can and nothing else much matters.
The larger problem, of course, is money and the endless quest for it. Politicians spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising, and most of them hate it. Yet even those who most fervently claim to want campaign finance reform alway make sure to leave loopholes for themselves in any legislation that passes. The reality is it is almost impossible to get money out of the process as everyone is in on it, i.e. the pious media certainly does not want to lose all the money they collect in advertising.
But what we can do, and what we desperately need to bring about is election reform. A good part of the problem would be mitigated if we limited the amount of time that campaigns can occur in, which would certainly spare us a lot of the cacophony of the endless campaign. Furthermore we need to get rid of primaries, which simply inordinately increase the resources needed to run for office. The idea that they are somehow more “democratic” is a delusion, given that few people vote in them, and those who do tend to be activists which simply pulls the parties to the extremes. The truth is the “party” is really comprised of the elected officials identifying with it, and they are the ones who should be nominating candidates. (I’ve written on this before with regard to the presidency but the idea hasn’t gotten any traction yet).
It does not, however, completely resolve the problem of money. It is not so much that it gives advantage to “the rich” since they are as varied in outlook as the rest of the population and the notion that they form a cohesive “class” is simply not reflected in reality. But there are wealthy individuals who, on a personal level, do get more access than they deserve because politicians are generally easily impressed by big money. So they get to hang around and mostly feed each others’ egos, go to Epstein’s island, etc. Then when it sometimes blows up they have to scramble to disassociate themselves from people they were intimately associated with.
I will never forget how, years ago, I did a lot of work for a candidate for a top executive position because I took him seriously in his commitment to principle. At the same time, from the opposite side, a billionaire I had some acquaintance with was doing everything possible to defeat this candidate, organizing and pouring funds into the incumbent’s campaign. My candidate won. But I cannot overstate the shock I felt when barely a few weeks into his term he had dinner with the same billionaire who had just worked against him so strongly. I have never trusted any of them since then and it wasn’t long before I completely walked away from all of that. Money trumps principle, and just about everything else, and these people are never going to change. Thus the only thing to do is to eliminate as much of the need for funds as possible starting with what I have outlined above.
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