Democratic Elections Without Roots

Maybe it was always so (I can’t claim to have made a study of the matter), but the gap between the electorate and the people elected to represent the people is becoming harder to ignore.  Americans who still have a sense of their government that is some blend of Norman Rockwell paintings and proclamations about government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” should ask themselves whether what we’ve got is what that should look like.

I’m thinking of this part of today’s Providence Journal Political Scene:

Speaking of money, the Raimondo campaign spread a lot of it around.

Her latest campaign filing with the state Board of Elections reflects payments of $10, $20, $40 — and in some cases 10 times that — to more than 180 people in the days just before and after the primary. …

The payments were listed under the heading: “employee services.”

Asked what services were provided, Raimondo campaign manager Eric Hyers said: “Those individuals were door-knocking during the final days of the primary as part of our GOTV [get-out-the-vote] operation.”

Obviously, campaigns will always have to pay people to do certain work, whether designing professional materials or managing the campaigns.  Even people who would like to volunteer have to support their families somehow, and the big business of running campaigns involves many full-time jobs.

Still, I’ve been faulting Republican candidates for higher offices for not starting from the bottom.  Every election season, people emerge from nowhere — with no name recognition and without ever having held any public office before — who want to run for Senate or Congress, or some full-time statewide office.  Typically, they lose, leaving not only the seats they didn’t win to their opposition, but also all of the lower seats for which they didn’t run.  They leave discouraged and with whatever new volunteers they brought into the fold discouraged, as well.

Raimondo’s hiring of people to walk the streets supporting her seems to point to the same basic problem.  Out here among the grassroots, the people knocking on doors and handing out materials more often than not contributed money, rather than receiving it.  And if the candidates and causes they support were to work their way up the ladder, that dynamic seems like it would continue and expand.

More investigation would be needed to go beyond speculation, but Raimondo’s Republican opponent, Allan Fung, has followed that path, from city council to mayor to gubernatorial candidate.  While his latest campaign filing does have a handful of people receiving money through catch-all categories like “consultant & professional services” or “employee services,” there does not appear to be a wave of payments to people to undertake grassroots-type activities, if their marker is a long list of smaller payments to many individuals.

The impression that the Political Scene blurb gives, by contrast, is of a system in which existing power brokers and special interests pick a candidate and then ramp up their machines to elect them.

Phrased that way, differing understandings of democracy are easy to see.  On one hand, some elected officials can trace the people who worked with them all the way back to their first campaigns, when it’s more like a field of equals, with broad overlap of supporters, contributors, volunteers, and voters.  That’s who got them where they are, and it’s a direct link to the communities that they serve.

On the other hand, some elected officials have reason to credit the brokers and interests who made it possible for them to persuade (or even manipulate) the people to vote for them.  That’s who got them where they are, and there’s a wall of disconnect (or even opposition) between the leadership that such a system produces and the community it is supposed to serve.

I note, from a link in Patrick’s post, that the Rhode Island Board of Elections’ list of outstanding fines from individuals and organizations includes $4,739 owed by the Tiverton Political Action Committee for Education.  The filings for that organization show that it’s the PAC of the local branch of the National Education Association of Rhode Island teachers union, and as I’ve pointed out on Tiverton Fact Check, the group is mainly involved in statewide races, giving money to politicians running for General Assembly seats from the other side of the state, as well as to Governor Lincoln Chafee.

To the extent that those distant politicians feel these contributions helped to put them where they are, whom will they credit?  The individual teachers of Tiverton, or the larger NEA special interest whose locals are shuffling money around the state?

In Rhode Island, and elsewhere, it’s treated as a faux pas to say anything that might seem partisan (at least if it isn’t supportive of Democrats), but Rhode Islanders should really begin to look not at words but at behaviors.  They should put aside a too-easy equivalence between the two major parties and see that different beliefs and different circumstances really do produce different behaviors and different candidates.

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