Every spring at the county stock show, there is a moment I wait for all year. A child leads a steer into the ring, and a man in a good hat stands up and bids more than the animal could ever be worth. The crowd claps. The child cries. Everybody understands that he was not really buying the steer.
I think of that man whenever somebody complains about money in our elections. The complaint is always the same. A very wealthy man gives a great deal, and the worry is that he expects something for it. I want to suggest a different way of looking at it. Most people give nothing at all. A man who gives that much has shown you, in the plainest language there is, how much he cares.
Caring is the whole thing. I would rather be governed by people backed by men with something at stake than by people backed by nobody. A man with a large fortune has a large interest in how things turn out. The waitress at the diner has her opinions, and I respect them, but she cannot be expected to follow the tax code the way he does.
People ask whether the donor gets more of a hearing than the rest of us. I expect he does. When my brother-in-law helped pay for the new fellowship hall, the pastor asked him what color he wanted the carpet. Nobody thought that was corruption. We thought it was manners. You listen to the person who showed up with the check.
I do not see why a statehouse should be any different from a fellowship hall. The men who fund our campaigns are not strangers to the officials they fund. They are friends of long standing. They have dinner together. They know each other’s children. When a bill comes along that touches the donor’s business, it is only natural that the official would think of his friend first. That is loyalty, and there is little enough of it left.
The reformers want to limit all this, and I understand where they are coming from. They imagine a politics where every voice counts the same. It is a pretty picture. But I have never seen anything in life where every voice counts the same, and I am not sure I would want to. Somebody has to be the man in the good hat. I will be voting for the Republican for Senate this fall with the stock show in mind. I gather the other side wants to get the big money out of our elections, and I would hate to see the man in the good hat sit down.
The rest of us can clap. Clapping is a kind of participation too.
I have never written a check that large. Nobody has ever asked me what color I want the carpet.
D. M.