Democrats are failing (cont.)

"The Baseline Scenario" should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the inter-relation between our economic problems and political failures.

In the latest post, James Kwak hits the bulls-eye when he addresses Peter Orzag's analysis of our current situation:

Peter Orszag wrote an article for the latest Democracy** about political dysfunction and the “looming fiscal showdown” at the end of this year. A lot of it is a warmed-over description of political polarization, although Orszag ignores one of its most important causes: the growing influence of money in politics and the resulting need for politicians to go chasing after contributions from extremist billionaires. (Orszag instead subscribes to the theory that political polarization results from public polarization, which has been pretty well debunked by Fiorina and Abrams.)

But Kwak doesn't go far enough.  His reference to "extremist billionaires" obviously relates to the impact of the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and other right-wing funders.  It is just as accurate to define the problem as the need for politicians to spend the majority of their time chasing after donors who can give them thousands of dollars.

As outlined in my first post on this topic, the middle-class is financially where they were in the mid 90s.  One of the things that means is that almost no one below the 90th percentile of income/wealth has thousands of dollars sitting around to donate to any candidate.

The New York Times magazine had an article about President Obama's Wall Street donors.  One of them asked why the president didn't make a speech similar to his race speech from 4 years ago to make Americans "understand" how beleaguered those in the financial sector really are.

This is one of the reasons why I say Democrats are failing.  The pursuit of more money doesn't allow Democrats to "hear" middle-class voters.  Because candidates spend so much time listening to the folks who can sign a $2000 or $5000 check.

Candidates need to self-limit the maximum contribution to their campaigns.  It must be an amount most voters can give ($200 or $500).

Many folks will say this concedes elections to those candidates who are willing to court large contributors.  That may be true for an election or two.  But if the middle-class has stagnated for almost 2 decades, what do Democrats call success.

If candidates quit playing by the rules that hugely favor the wealthiest, then they can truly listen to and represent middle-class and working families.

If we want to know how a candidate will represent us, we should require that she be willing to start by changing the balance of power in her own campaign.