A few years ago, as I was preparing to run for Congress in California, one of my first steps was to hire a campaign treasurer. My friends who were elected officials recommended Kinde Durkee -- without any reservation. Durkee, who had represented dozens of Democratic officials and organizations, seemed eager to have me as a client. However, after discovering she represented my opponent in the primary, she declined to represent me.
Lucky for me. Durkee may be the Bernie Madoff of California Democrats, having allegedly embezzled from hundreds of campaign accounts. If so, this was a classic "affinity scheme," where people put their trust in friends and colleagues, and ignored the warning signs, including a history of infractions and fines. While it might be tempting to view the Durkee scandal as an isolated case (as was the initial take on Madoff's crimes), the problem cuts much deeper -- right to the heart of our political culture.
One glaring problem is poor oversight of political campaign financing. We have some pretty tough election laws, but most enforcement boils down to policing technicalities rather than any real oversight. But the basic problem is the "inside game" of politics. Citizens complain the political system is rigged, but you can't really appreciate the extent of the inside game until you have run for office. It is virtually impossible to successfully run for state or federal office unless you have been vetted by your party's establishment.
Our political system does create an insider culture that is too often immune to outside influences. Since the public does not participate in any genuine way in the political system, it is left by default to political insiders to run the game.
However, you can't place the full blame -- or even most of it -- on elected officials or political insiders. They are simply playing the game in a system we created. And what are the two main ingredients of that system? Billions of dollars and public indifference.
Every election cycle, we flood the political culture with money, and with recent Supreme Court decisions, that flood of money will soon reach biblical proportions. No political system can withstand a torrent of lightly regulated billions without succumbing to ethical decline at best and outright corruption at worst. We have seen the kind of corruption that descends on countries like Iraq and Afghanistan when they are inundated with American money. We are now at risk of breeding the same kind of corruption at home.
Ultimately, the blame rests on public indifference. While cable news and the Internet are brimming with coverage of the political horse races and the heat over social wedge issues, actual participation by the public is abysmally low. The United States currently ranks 114th in the world in voter participation in general elections, somewhere between Uganda and Peru. However, the rate of voter participation in the all-important primary and local elections is below 20 percent of eligible voters, which would not even make the world rankings.
When so few voters participate -- about 7 percent of eligible voters participate in Democratic primaries, for example -- the political insiders are answerable only to a tiny minority of activists who are themselves insiders. This creates a political culture of indifference to public opinion and tilts the slippery slope toward corruption, not to mention the rise of extremism, partisanship and political gridlock.
Defeating these threats to our political system is pretty simple -- limit campaign spending and encourage people to vote. Despite the Supreme Court's recent decisions, it is certainly possible to constitutionally limit the billions now spent on electioneering. And encouraging more people to vote could be as simple as providing a couple of hours off from work to exercise a fundamental responsibility of citizenship or making mail-in voting easier. Failing that, some sort of compulsory voting system might be possible. While nobody would go to jail for not voting, citizens get the message with both a carrot and a stick.
Change will not come from inside the political parties, since insiders don't want to risk their competitive advantages, although most insiders would love to be liberated from the drudgery of fundraising. The only way to rescue the political system is for the public to rise up and demand reform -- an "American Spring" to match the Arab Spring. Unless and until that happens, there will be many more Kinde Durkees.
This article was originally published in the Sacramento Bee.
Follow Hoyt Hilsman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HoytHilsman
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