The Chris Moeller Archives

The most important political phrase of this generation is "wine cave"

During the final weeks of the last millennium, the cable television channel A&E used their Biography series to count down their editors’ list of the most important people of the last thousand years. For #1, they settled on German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the printing press and started the paper printing revolution. The logic behind the choice was that his invention (in or around the year 1440) led to the circulation of the millions of volumes of documents that then informed all other areas of the arts and sciences. It was the most vital “agent of change” during the age.

Something similar exists in American politics, an overarching issue that impacts all others and must be considered the most important. Though I’m personally partial to military policy and the opposition to empire-building as a number one voting issue, a larger umbrella one is the legalized bribery that has been impacting nearly every decision made by our government. The corruption is so pervasive that that it’s increasingly recognized as inherent to the structure and eternally beyond the grasp of reform.

It’s long been the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party, ostensibly the party of working people in the U.S., that you have to dirty your hands in a corrupt game. Since 1981, Democrats have been committed to trying to raise money from the same Wall Street sources that fund their Republican opponents. Becoming Junior Reagans cost them the permanent majorities they had held in Congress since the New Deal, and the additional cost for America was creating the first generations in history to be worse off financially than their forebears. But on the plus side, a lot of Washington insiders have gotten really rich.

Two candidates running for president under the electoral apparatus of the Democratic Party are challenging this precept. Both now front-runners, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have vowed not to accept money from billionaires. Unlike their opponents, they’re leaning entirely on small contributions to fund their respective campaigns and not accepting large donations to make up for any financial disadvantage. They both hold the crazy belief that political corruption might be an issue in a political race against Donald Trump.

One of their opponents, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of Fort Wayne, Indiana, appears to have been built in a laboratory as an experimental model to test how gullible Democratic primary voters are. He’s a theoretical study into how truly wedded to empty rhetoric and unlikely-to-be-fulfilled promises a group of angry voters can conceivably be. Buttigieg promises an end to racial disparities in police hiring, but the Fort Wayne municipality features an extreme imbalance between the racial makeup of the city and its police force. He’s pledged diversity on his senior staff, but his Fort Wayne cabinet is almost completely white. With polls showing an almost infinitesimal number of African-American supporters for the Pete campaign, it combated that reality by mocking up a campaign advertisement featuring endorsements from African-American pols who have offered nothing of the kind. But hey, listen to what he says he’s going to do.

Pete has no political record upon which to run. He vaguely promises to deliver a Midwestern vote for the party even though he was trounced by 25 percentage points in his only statewide race in Indiana in 2012, and he seems to be intended as an option for voters on the middle-right who are afraid of health care as a human right, and to take the place of Joe Biden, whose increasingly-doddering behavior can no longer be easily hidden, and who faces-- even before a hypothetical series of televised debates against the Bully Trump-- an impeachment trial subpoena and televised testimony before the Senate this winter regarding the Biden family’s financial hustle in Ukraine.

Pete rides to the front of the pack with the approval of the traditional news media. Trained Washington observers argue that the Democratic primary debate has begun its traditional and natural “shift to the political middle,” but that shift, in reality, comes just from the rest of the pack positioning themselves from their previous flank to the left of Biden now to the right of the surging Warren and Sanders. To replace Biden as the darling of the “mainstream," Buttigieg does have the advantage of being whatever candidate you want him to be. As an inspired unknown politico a year or two ago, he supported Medicare-for-all. Now he attacks it, saying it would remove “choice.” I suspect he’ll have found his natural calling by the year 2022, if not before-- that of a generously-paid Washington lobbyist.

Pete’s historical legacy as a candidate instead will be in having been the featured guest at the great “wine cave” fundraising event of 2019. If you’re not familiar, he’s been targeted by Sanders and Warren this month for having entertained a private fundraiser-- no media allowed-- at the home of a pair of California billionaire winemakers, Kathryn and Craig Hall. Kathryn was once Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s ambassador to Austria. The event was held in the presence of the couple’s extravagant chandelier-- 1,500 Swarovski crystals(?)-- and in their vineyard’s “wine cave.” The photos of the set table were lovely. Someone leaked the photos-- again, a private affair. Bottles of the Cabernet Sauvignon that were served at the event sell for as much as $900.

Coupled with news of the event was a report on Huffington Post that one of Buttigieg’s staffers and long-time allies sent an email to a wealthy potential donor promising better access to the candidate if he were to pony up a size-able contribution before the campaign really takes off. Pay-for-play, some call that. According to Axios, the Buttigieg campaign calls donations “investments.” Like so many other well-financed campaigns, they argue that the money being given doesn’t qualify as pay-for-play, yet they explicitly refuse to take money from fossil fuel executives, registered lobbyists, or corporate political action committees. So…yeah… what exactly are we to deduce of donations from, say, insurance executives, or pharmaceutical reps?

It’s all enough to make normal people shake their heads in familiar disappointment, but DNC hacks and some wealthy celebrities, from inside their bubbles, rushed to defend Pete, his wealthy backers, and their entire way of life. This is how Obama raised money, they tell us. This is how Nancy Pelosi does it. We need every dollar at our disposal to help defeat Donald Trump. 

Really? Is that how it works? We need billionaires’ maxed-out contributions to less popular candidates to help defeat opponents whose financial sheets better reflect voter support than Wall Street support? And Trumpism is so terrible that every weapon should be deployed against it, up to and including selling off the government itself? Like a Vietnamese village being torched, evidently, the United States government must be destroyed in order to be saved.

Dollars aren’t needed to defeat Trump. Not those dollars, anyway. The most votes wins the election, not the most dollars. Trump didn’t need the most dollars to knock off Jeb Bush and John Kasich in 2016. Sanders didn’t need the most dollars to beat Hillary-- he only needed the DNC’s proverbial thumb to be removed from the scale.

The age of corporate money controlling politics has subsided to a small degree. At least there's a ray of hope in this area. It’s perhaps an unexpected consequence of the deeply unpopular Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, but more so, an outgrowth of the explosion of small campaign donations made possible through online voter connections, as well as some courageous campaign decisions made more recently by Sanders, Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a handful of others. One might argue-- and Bernie and Liz likely both would-- that corporate dollars not taken actually lead to more individual dollars being offered, and ultimately, to more votes. Why else do Sanders and Warren lead so lopsidedly in the number of small donations received? I believe that contributors to their campaigns know that the donations truly matter, even when none of us qualify for special privilege.

The school of thought from the other side of the equation seems to be that the only true form of political corruption is what breaks the law. Of course, that implies that the system as a whole hasn’t been formally rigged and won’t continue to be rigged. That would seem to be an unpopular theory, however, with the American people, whose support the campaigns are all vying for. A recent survey by the GS Strategy Group found that 54 percent of Americans categorize “corruption in our political system” as an extremely serious problem. That was much more than any other single issue, more than health care costs, climate change, immigration, you name it. It’s the Johannes Gutenberg issue. In the New York Times in 2015, 85% of Americans said the campaign finance system needs “fundamental changes” or to be “completely rebuilt.” Are the party insiders and the billionaire contributors just purposefully ignorant of this popular perception, or do they really not get it?

How do we think Kathryn Hall became ambassador to Austria in the first place? She and her husband have given over two million dollars to Democratic candidates since the 1980's. The winery hosts an annual event for Nancy Pelosi. Before Pelosi was house speaker, Jim Wright of Texas was, during the ‘80's, and Craig Hall gave generously to him. That helped Hall avoid prison when his savings and loan went under, but the special favors led to Wright having to resign as speaker. Buttigieg has no federal office to surrender, but he’s a new favorite of Kathryn and Craig. Who gets to choose who our next president will be? Them? Or you and me and the whole lot of us?

The traditional news media has no clue how to handle this style of corruption having been made an issue. It’s been their way of life too-- pay-for-play. Where do those dollars get spent, after all? On media buys. Sanders’ team created the URL domain ‘peteswinecave.com," and their hyperlink leads to Sanders' contribution page. Warren endured the return rhetorical punches from Buttigieg, such as they were, on the debate stage. Are the two senators hypocrites because they’ve hosted high-dollar fundraisers in the past? You can decide that for yourself. Is Barack Obama a hypocrite because he used to oppose gay marriage and then came around to support it? Sanders and Warren are denouncing the practice now, and Buttigieg is still defending it.

A President Sanders or a President Warren, in 2021, won’t be beholden to anybody but their respective army of small-dollar contributors. A President Buttigieg would have welcomed the biggest dollars he could get-- from anybody, and, once more, you’d better get to him now before his campaign really takes off. The Iowa Caucuses will arrive the first Monday in February and it might be hard to get Pete on the phone after that.

posted by CM @ 11:09 PM