![]() ![]() The elevation of the small-dollar donor has created other nightmarish unintended consequences, however. The new no-limits era allowed big donors to maximize huge contributions to political committees and blasted billions in dark money through the system, continually raising the stakes of each fund-raising deadline. Meanwhile, a series of court decisions supercharged political fund-raising generally. It’s created a perverse incentive structure, empowering the congressional shock jocks at the expense of actual legislators. They learned that they could raise money and gain influence not through the long slog of relationship and coalition building in Washington but instantaneously by being jerks on the internet and calling out their voters’ enemy du jour in the most ostentatious manner they could summon. Wilson and cared not at all about manners or the media elite’s opinion. This moment of proto-lib-owning virality offered a playbook for a new generation of political performance artists who were more native to these tools than Mr. The result: In just 12 days he collected more money than he spent during his entire previous campaign. Wilson retained a “new media strategist,” “uploaded fund-raising pleas to YouTube” and purchased banner ad space on The Drudge Report. As CNN’s Peter Hamby reported at the time, it “bulked up to seize the fund-raising opportunity” and in the weeks that followed, Mr. Wilson’s campaign team pressed the advantage. Obama for the outburst.īut after the Democratic-controlled Congress censured him anyway, Mr. Wilson, a mild-mannered Southerner, apologized to Mr. At first, the fallout from this incident transpired in a standard before-times fashion. And it’s hard to imagine how we can stop it.Ī warning of the hellscape to come took place in late 2009, when a little-known South Carolina congressman named Joe Wilson raised well over $2 million after he shouted “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during a health care address to a joint session of Congress. It has redirected money from politicians who work to find compromises that might just help people, diverting it instead to those who either have no chance to win or, worse yet, can win and want to undermine that work for their own ends. It is one way our most extreme candidates dominate the conversation and gain power in our political system. It is how Donald Trump and his cast of clueless coupsters raised nine figures to “stop the steal” that they had fabricated to try to stay in power. Our online fund-raising system is not only enriching scam artists, clogging our inboxes and inflaming the electorate it is also empowering our politics’ most nefarious actors. As with any other mass movement, people-powered campaigns followed the standard Hofferian trajectory: beginning as a cause, turning into a business and becoming a racket. This is what democracy looks like!!!Īs it turned out, grass-roots fund-raising is also what ending democracy looks like. Big-dollar donations from corporate cronies are suspect. ![]() The overwhelmingly positive narrative about the power of small-dollar online fund-raising began to congeal: Grass-roots fund-raising is pure and good. McCain at his own game with an unprecedented money bomb leveraging what the journalist Sasha Issenberg has called “ the victory lab.” The dreams of an idealistic outsider disrupting the existing order quickly came to fruition in 2008 when Barack Obama upended the Clinton machine, then beat Mr. “We really give people a lot of power, and other campaigns are scared to do that,” said Zephyr Teachout, the Dean campaign’s director of online organization, at the time. Dean both lost - but good-government types, the media and many regular Americans viewed this new funding mechanism and the little-d democratization of campaign finance as a way to challenge, and hopefully overtake, the corrupted status quo. “ McCain Gets Big Payoff on Web Site” was this paper’s headline a few days after his surprise New Hampshire win: He had brought in nearly a million dollars in “e-donations” in just two days. John McCain’s upstart campaign had leveraged it to a less prodigious degree in 2000. Dean wasn’t the first to use online fund-raising in presidential politics. Through this online community building, it brought in a record $14.8 million in a single quarter. It could leverage these new tools to raise money by channeling the “netroots” anger at the Republican president and the bipartisan establishment that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. And the internet was allowing supporters of politicians to use new tools such as “ the Web log, or ‘blog’” to plot together in real time.Īmid this upheaval, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign saw an opportunity. Shock and awe had given way to the long slog of war. In late 2003 the spirit of revolution was in the air and on our web browsers.
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