Fitzsimon File

The news is filled these days with stories about one of the most important factors in determining who is elected to statewide office in North Carolina, how much money they have raised.

Candidates year-end campaign finance reports were due Friday and most are now available online at the State Board of Election website. Even though most campaigns have just begun, candidates are judged by how much money they raise and how much they have in the bank.  In the current political system, money translates into credibility.

Both Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue and State Treasurer Richard Moore have raised more than $6 million for their campaigns. Perdue raised slightly more in the last six months, Moore had a little more cash in the bank at the end of the year, just over $4.6 million to Perdue’s $4.5 million.

The Republican candidates raised much less, but are still convincing a lot of wealthy people to write them checks. State Senator Fred Smith brought in close to $500,000 in the last six months, far more than his primary opponents.

There’s plenty of analysis of the candidates fundraising and that’s important. It’s an indication of who will have the politician’s ear after the election.  Big donors are making an investment when they contribute and raise money and most of them expect a return, at least in access if not support for legislation or appointments or roads.

But there’s a perspective missing from much of the discussion of who is raising how much and from whom, primarily that most people in the state can’t begin to comprehend the amounts of money involved or have much in common with the small numbers of people who contribute and raise most of it.

A few years ago, Democracy North Carolina released a report showing that one percent of the people in the state contribute 90 percent of the money donated to political campaigns. A much smaller percentage than that raise most of the money.

It means that candidates spend an inordinate amount of time talking to people with a lot of money whose interests and experiences and perspectives are much different than those of most people in the state.

Increasingly candidates themselves are extraordinarily wealthy. Political parties actively recruit candidates who can fund much of their own campaigns. Some pundits argue that those candidates are more independent, not beholden to as many donors and fundraisers.

Maybe, but their lives and experiences are still a long way from those of most of the people they seek to represent.  Some politicians with vast personal wealth do work passionately for the poor and working poor, but they are the exception not the rule.

The current political system also reinforces the flawed assumption that the most successful people in the state are wealthy, that those who have chosen careers that don’t pay high salaries are somehow less capable of leading the state that people with a lot of money.

The latest campaign reports provide plenty of evidence that it’s generally the wealthy who are running, and not just for governor. Democratic candidate for Treasurer David Young has contributed $110,000 of his own money to his campaign.

One of his opponents in the Democratic primary, Michael Weisel has loaned his campaign $356,000. State Senator Janet Cowell is also running for Treasurer and has no access to personal wealth, though she raised $210,000 in the last six months of the year.

Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor Hampton Dellinger has loaned his campaign $25,000 and received $178,000 in loans from his parents.  Fred Smith loaned his gubernatorial campaign $1.9 million and Beverly Perdue’s husband has loaned her campaign $275,000.  

None of that means those candidates are insensitive to the struggles of average North Carolinians or can’t understand the lives of the 16 percent of the families in the state whose income hovers around the federal poverty level.  Their positions suggest that some of them do and some of them don’t.

But it’s simply unrealistic to expect that they can feel what many people in North Carolina face in day to day decisions.

A former member of the General Assembly said recently that he always knew school was about to start because he would see mothers walking with their children around a certain school during the day, helping their kids get used to where they would spend their fall and spring days.

The school is an affluent part of an urban area and the former legislator is a retired corporate executive. Someone said to him that that there aren’t any poor parents taking the school tour with their children and he said “that’s because the poor parents don’t care.”  

Don’t care or working at a job that won’t allow them to leave or raising a child as a single parent working two jobs?  

Starkly different perspectives from folks who can loan a campaign $100,000 and those who can’t. It is a different sort of lending crisis and it doesn’t explain all the problems in our current political system, but it surely explains some of them.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.