Looking for answers to the $5.8 billion question
There are a whole bunch of questions I’d like to have answered between now and Nov. 5, including:
■Why does it take so long and cost so much to elect a president? The current race for the White House has been going on since 12 nanoseconds after the conclusion of the last race for the White House.
And that race, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan research group, cost $5,700,916,140.
■What do the political parties do with all that money? How do you spend nearly $5.8 billion to influence the two or three dozen voters who haven’t already made up their minds? Buy them signs to stick in their front yards? Caps and T-shirts for them to wear at rallies? Balloons for them to see floating down from the ceiling at the winning party’s election night celebration?
A major expense, I suppose, is television ads. So why don’t we just require every television network to donate one prime time hour a week for presidential candidates to repeat the same slogans, distortions and empty promises we’ve already heard from them ad nauseam?
■If Kamala Harris becomes the first female president, why has it
taken so long? Women have been voting in this country since 1920 and there are more of them than there are men. And this is, after all, the year of the woman: Taylor Swift, Caitlin Clark, Beyonce, Simone Biles. The only notables my gender produced this year, on the other hand, were JD Vance and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.
■Do voters really change their minds because a volunteer campaign worker emailed them or knocked on their door?
■Why are there nonpartisan “get out the vote” organizations? If people need to be encouraged, nagged or shamed to get off their couches to cast a ballot, they aren’t necessarily the most enlightened voters and probably have spent less time watching CSPAN than they have watching old Three Stooges flicks. (Full disclosure: I’ve spent far more hours of my life watching Three Stooges than watching CSPAN. But I’m going to vote anyway).
■Why don’t we have campaign contribution limits? Yeah, yeah, I know, we DO have limits. But, amazingly, certain patriotic Americans manage to slip a few million to candidates they want to buy, rent or lease for the next four years.
So I’m proposing a $20 limit. No exceptions. No excuses. (If you can’t find a spare $1.67 a month in your budget, no-interest government loans could be available.) If every American over the age of 18 would make that sacrifice, the total would be a bit less than the parties spent four years ago.
But maybe this time they could skip the balloons.