Miseducating the Public: Hollywood and Citizens United

Yesterday, I saw The Candidate, the new Will Ferrell movie that pits Ferrell, the incumbent Democrat, against Zach Galifianakis, an incompetent loser, in a race for the 14th House District in North Carolina.  The movie is typical of the over-the-top kinds of comedies that Hollywood has been churning out since the mid-90's.  Even though both Ferrell and Galifianakis are identified by party, the role of the actual positions that are typically espoused by either party are cast aside in favor of showing that politics today is driven by money and only money.  The main reason this is so, the film both implies and outright states, is the dastardly evil and corrupt Citizens United decision, which supposedly opened up the door for corporations both in the United States and overseas to buy and sell presidents, representatives, and senators as if they were buying and trading stocks.  (The antagonists of the film, the evil Moch brothers, are very similar to another set of brothers in the earlier, and much better, Trading Places, are of course stand ins for the much derided and maligned Koch brothers -- though no liberal can ever seem to even give a coherent account of just what Koch Industries actually does.)  Even as I got up and was leaving the theater, I heard a couple a few rows in front of me discussing the evils of the Citizens United ruling and how it debased our politics even further than it already was.

But even a source like The New York Times Magazine has pointed out that almost everything we think we know about the consequences of Citizens United is just flat wrong.  Here is Matt Bai, the chief political correspondent, on this topic back in mid-July:

The reason for this exponential leap in political spending, if you talk to most Democrats or read most news reports, comes down to two words: Citizens United. The term is shorthand for a Supreme Court decision that gave corporations much of the same right to political speech as individuals have, thus removing virtually any restriction on corporate money in politics. The oft-repeated narrative of 2012 goes like this: Citizens United unleashed a torrent of money from businesses and the multimillionaires who run them, and as a result we are now seeing the corporate takeover of American politics.

As a matter of political strategy, this is a useful story to tell, appealing to liberals and independent voters who aren’t necessarily enthusiastic about the administration but who are concerned about societal inequality, which is why President Obama has made it a rallying cry almost from the moment the Citizens United ruling was made. But if you’re trying to understand what’s really going on with politics and money, the accepted narrative around Citizens United is, at best, overly simplistic. And in some respects, it’s just plain wrong.

Some actual facts on the subject:

Those who criticize the effect of Citizens United look at these very technical changes [mostly linguistic in nature] and see an obvious causal relationship. The high court says outside groups are allowed to use corporate dollars to expressly support candidates, and suddenly we have this tidal wave of money threatening to overwhelm the airways. One must have led to the other, right?

Well, not necessarily. Legally speaking, zillionaires were no less able to write fat checks four years ago than they are today. And while it is true that corporations can now give money for specific purposes that were prohibited before, it seems they aren’t, or at least not at a level that accounts for anything like the sudden influx of money into the system. According to a brief filed by Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, in a Montana case on which the Supreme Court ruled last month, not a single Fortune 100 company contributed to a candidate’s super PAC during this year’s Republican primaries. Of the $96 million or more raised by these super PACs, only about 13 percent came from privately held corporations, and less than 1 percent came from publicly traded corporations.

Even smart liberals realize how Democrats have overplayed their hand:

Even so, the Supreme Court’s ruling really wasn’t the sort of tectonic event that Obama and his allies would have you believe it was. “I’d go so far as to call it a liberal delusion,” Ira Glasser, the former executive director of the A.C.L.U. and a liberal dissenter on Citizens United, told me. Which leads to an obvious question: If Citizens United doesn’t explain this billion-dollar blast of outside money, then what does? 

But what about the massive influx of money since the descision:

The level of outside money increased 164 percent from 2004 to 2008. Then it rose 135 percent from 2008 to 2012. In other words, while the sheer amount of dollars seems considerably more ominous after Citizens United, the percentage of change from one presidential election to the next has remained pretty consistent since the passage of McCain-Feingold. And this suggests that the rising amount of outside money was probably bound to reach ever more staggering levels with or without Citizens United. The unintended consequence of McCain-Feingold was to begin a gradual migration of political might from inside the party structure to outside it. 

And in his examination of raw numbers, [campaign finance "expert" Richard] Hasen managed to ignore what is probably the most relevant bit of data during this period: 2010 and 2012 were the first election cycles since the enactment of McCain-Feingold in which a Democrat occupied the White House. Rich conservatives weren’t inspired to invest their fortunes in 2004, when Bush ran for the second time while waging an unpopular war, or in 2008, when they were forced to endure the nomination of McCain. But now there’s a president and a legislative agenda they bitterly despise (much as Soros and his friends saw the Bush presidency as an existential threat to the country), so it’s not surprising that outside spending by Republicans in 2010 and 2012 would dwarf everything that came before. What we are seeing — what we almost certainly would have seen even without the court’s ruling in Citizens United — is the full force of conservative wealth in America, mobilized by a common enemy for the first time since the fall of party monopolies. 

Doesn't more money equal a political advantage:

I recently called Carter Eskew, a longtime Democratic adman and strategist whose clients included Al Gore in 2000, and asked him a simple question: How much did he think he would really need for a candidate today, if he could have an unlimited budget to run a national ad campaign, including all the outside money? Eskew paused before giving a declarative answer: $500 million. Anything beyond that, he said, was probably overkill.

In other words, there’s a threshold below which a presidential candidate can’t really compete effectively, and that number — whether it’s $500 million or something less — is outlandish enough that it should give us pause. But beyond that number, it’s not clear that spending an extra $200 million or $500 million will really make all that much of a difference on Election Day. More likely, the two ideological factions are now like rivals of the nuclear age, stockpiling enough bombs to destroy the same cities over and over again, when one would do the job.

Well, it looks as though the "narrative" on Citizens United is absolutely false.  But, when a certain party (with the help of Hollywood and the MSM) is running a campaign in which the goal is to obfuscate rather than educate, this all makes sense.