Aspects of the episode are still being argued about, and a chagrined Democratic National Committee has offered to send the money back. But however the thing is finally disposed, what interested me was the reaction to it in town. People sounded unusually indignant, even scandalized. ““This one is really disgusting,’’ they would say, ““just awful.’’ I concluded that more was agitating them than the reverse-Robin Hood unfairness of the transaction. What was distinctive this time was that the money had actually seemed to belong to someone. It wasn’t corporate money, or expense-of-doing-business money, or appropriated money or money no one would miss because no one really knew where it came from, except that it didn’t come from them. It was none of those familiar kinds of Washington legal tender. It was money someone would miss, money that could now not be used to pay for something else important, a gift whose cost the giver would feel.
What a novelty. No wonder we were all up in arms. The huge amounts of money sloshing noisily through the pipes in election-year Washington are usually not like that. They are like the sums that slosh through the pipes in non-election years, when we are more occupied with budget fights, entitlement costs and so on. Both are seen as somebody else’s money, money from nowhere. Yes, it is true that much moist-eyed solicitude for the poor taxpayer is expressed in budget season. And, yes, it is also true–searingly true–that, in relation to campaign contributions, officeholders know exactly where it came from in terms of knowing where the reciprocal favor is due. In that sense they most definitely have the return address. And I am sure that for some of the big givers, these outlays are not entirely painless, either, but rather are seen as promising though fairly costly investments.
Still, the basic circumstance is the same: the huge contributions are largely money ““given’’ by people who probably didn’t really work for it in any direct sense and don’t feel its loss. The people to whom it is given didn’t work for it in any traditional sense either, but are able to spend it as lavishly as the contributors contributed it, buying whatever it takes to fulfill their ambitions. As treated by the parties to the transactions, it is play money.
For as long as I can remember, Washington money, government money, has been perceived this way. I recall being struck by it back in the days when a cranky Louisiana congressional chairman named Otto Passman used to stage an annual war of resistance against foreign-aid funding. On those long winter nights on the Hill, when we were covering the melodramatic, final negotiations, even the young elevator operators would offer bulletins on the latest rumored state of play. ““Otto has gone up to $3.4 billion,’’ they would announce when you entered the car, ““says that’s it.’’ In those days, indeed until the mid-’70s reforms, people in Congress didn’t even need to produce a budget; the amounts they authorized to be spent and the revenues they authorized to be collected did not have to have anything to do with each other. This intensified the remorselessly abstract, theoretical way we were all tossing around the terms–$3.4 billion seemed about right for this, too little for that, and so forth–without any sense of either the provenance or the reality or the value of the money.
In the campaign context, this habit of mind is especially coarsening. That is because the money doesn’t just go to electrification projects in Third World countries that the public figure may favor or even for dams at home for which he can claim credit. It goes to further these public figures’ personal and professional ambitions, is spent directly on their career well-being, and comes in time to seem to them like their money. They spend a lot of time begging for it in the first instance and swaggering because of it in the second. It can be, in this respect, corrupting of the temperaments of all but the best and most clear-eyed of them. In a Washington environment in which, in any case, too many people are already floating on a cloud of freebies to which they consider themselves entitled, this dependence for survival on huge sums of unearned money from out of the ether is especially insidious.
Not long ago, when legislation was being considered that would have prevented members of Congress from taking gifts that included free tickets to pricey Kennedy Center for the Arts events, a bleat went up that this would be very shortsighted. Did those of us who favored it really want to cut off members of Congress from the civilizing effects of the arts? We said no, and added that we weren’t suggesting that they not go to the Kennedy Center, only that they, you know, buy their own tickets. This thought seemed not to have occurred to them. The episode was in its way akin to the flurry over the ripped-off Indians last week. That people here were jolted to learn that some of the big checks the pols were extracting for their campaign came from people who needed the money a whole lot more than they did, people for whom it was real money, seems to me to be a measure of their detachment. It also bespeaks a certain delusional quality that has come to our politicians with these vast infusions of money.
I say ““delusional’’ because as they start reciprocating with hospitality–those coffees and overnights and luncheons, the meet-and-greet sessions on the Hill, the dispensation of favors that are really not theirs to give–it all becomes a kind of parody of real life, only very cushy and, at the same time, for the public figures involved, unrealistically cheap. We need to remind them of where the money comes from and to know better where it goes. We need to upend our campaign-finance system. What’s going on is really sicko.
