Voting for Dollars

excerpted from the book

How to Overthrow the Government

by Arianna Huffington

ReganBooks, 2000, paper

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Less than one-fourth of 1 percent of Americans actually make a contribution of $200 or more to a candidate for federal office... Can elections decided by half the eligible voters and funded by less than 1 percent of the population-still be considered legitimate?

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It's time to realize that our government is no longer merely "influenced" by corporate contributions-for all practical purposes its every move is predetermined by them. It's time to recognize that politicians have become more responsive to their poll-wielding consultants than to the true needs of the country.

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Since 1964, the University of Michigan's National Election Studies has regularly asked eligible voters a simple question: whether, in their opinion, the U.S. government is run "for the benefit of all" or "by a few big interests." In 1998, nearly two-thirds-64 percent- answered "a few big interests," a complete reversal of the electorate's opinion in 1964. Sixty-two percent-compared to 36 percent in 1964-agreed with the statement, "Public of ficials don't care much what people like me think."

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The defenders of the status quo have no problem with disaffected citizens dropping out-it keeps them from making waves. Better that they get out than care enough to stay in and vote against them. In many ways, it is easier to play to, control, and manipulate a smaller audience. The key is to keep giving them no alternatives until they give up.

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Joseph Goebbels
[Propaganda] is the "art of simplification, constant recapitulation, appealing to the instinctive and the emotional and simply ignoring unpleasant facts."

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Lawrence Summers, former Treasury Secretary under George Bush senior,
said when he was chief economist with the World Bank in the early 1990s:

"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs?" he wrote. "A given amount of healthimpairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost.... I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable."

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... over forty years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, public schools have never been less equal or more segregated. Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, pointed to the "devastating" fact that 57 percent of parents surveyed would choose a private school for their children if they could afford it. The parents who can, like the president and vice president, have already voted on the sorry state of public education by taking their children out of it.

A Gallup poll released last August showed that 48 percent of white Americans-and 71 percent of African Americans- support school choice. Black parents are motivated by growing anxiety about their own children's welfare, while Al Gore and Bill Bradley, their own children safely in private schools, seem more concerned with the welfare of the system-and their college-educated donors-than the welfare of the children who cannot escape the system.

It's a simple, dark truth: baby boomer politicians are standing in the doors of crumbling schools telling poor children they can't get out, just as George Wallace once stood in the schoolhouse door telling black children they couldn't get in.

While our public schools are crumbling, prison building is booming, vvith more of our citizens-two million-living behind bars than in any other country. Over $35 billion in public funds are being spent to house them, in conditions that are often barbaric.

Last October in a California courtroom, Eddie Dillard, a first-time offender at Corcoran State Prison, told a chilling story of being placed by guards in a cell with Wayne Robertson, a convicted murderer with a long history of prison rapes. In sickening detail, Robertson, known as the "Booty Bandit," testified that despite Dillard's pleas that his life was in danger, the guards just laughed and walked away. Asked what happened after that, Robertson responded that he proceeded to beat and sodomize his cellmate for the next two days.

This is not an isolated incident. In 1998, a Corrections Department panel found that nearly 80 percent of shootings by Corcoran guards were not justified. Despite this, no district attorney in California has ever prosecuted a prison guard for one of the thirty-nine shooting deaths of inmates statewide in the last decade.

How could this be? As is so often the case these days, the answer can be found by following the money. "Whenever a local D.A. would go after guards aggressively," says Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Arax, who first uncovered these crimes and their cover-ups, "the guards' union would try to run the D.A. out of town with record amounts of campaign contributions to his opponent. After our stories, the union came after me and my colleague Mark Gladstone with personal attacks and investigations."

Here we have a particularly noxious example of the nexus between campaign contributions and policy. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the powerful prison guards' union, gave nearly a million dollars to former Governor Pete W~lson and former Attorney General Dan Lungren, and $2.3 million to help Governor Gray Davis win the 1998 election. Predictably, Davis did nothing to intervene as a bill that would have made it easier to investigate and prosecute corrupt prison guards was quietly given a death sentence in the state Assembly. According to Attorney General Bill Lockyer, "The CCPOA torpedoed this thing." One of the assemblymen who led the fight against it had received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from the union.

So contributions from the [California] prison guards' union - ranking right up there with the massive sums doled out by Big Tobacco and Archer Daniels Midland-are directly linked to miscarriages of justice that, in less self-involved times, would have led to a collective uproar. It's yet another glaring example of how our campaign financing system directly influences public policy.

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THE PUBLIC OPINION RACKET

Vaclav Havel, in his book The Art of the Impossible, has called for a generation of "post-modern politicians" who will have the courage to speak the truth and put principle above party loyalty. "First-hand personal insight into things and the courage to go the way one's conscience points are two of the qualities he identifies as essential for the politician of the future.

No two qualities could be less characteristic of American politicians secondhand, expedient, and above all poll-driven style of leadership. Today's political landscape is littered with ersatz leaders who can't even get dressed in the morning without consulting the latest numbers. God forbid they should put on boxers if 65 percent of the public "strongly agrees" they should wear briefs.

Our political system is being brought to itS knees by this obsession with polls. Far from being out of touch, our leaders are way too aware of the public's every passing whim. But what people want, or think they want, from moment to moment and what they need long term aren't always the same thing-and the way they answer questions often says more about the way they were asked than about what the people believe. Politicians have become pathological people pleasers, addicted to the short-term buzz of a bump in the polls and indifferent to the long-term effect. And pollsters are their dealers, providing the rusl~ of an instant-but ephemeral and highly manufactured- consensus.

Today's new poll-happy pol has replaced the old-fashioned leader-one unafraid to make diffficult, unpopular decisions. If Lincoln had surrounded himself with modern-day pollsters, he would more likely be known for something uncontroversial-creating Secretaries' Day, say-than for freeing the slaves.

The industry's notoriety dates back to 1936, when George Gallup proudly claimed that a random sampling of a few hundred people could predict elections. His claim was borne out when the Gallup Poll predicted Franklin Roosevelt's reelection, while the Literary Digest survey of two million readers picked Alf Landon.

Even so, our politicians' addiction to polls began slowly, as most addictions do. John F. Kennedy's administration was the first to be infected with the polling disease. "We were not unlike the people who checked their horoscope each day before venturing out," wrote Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's longtime secretary.

The 1976 election was the first time a presidential campaign was dominated by one pollster: Pat Caddell. "Jimmy Carter is going to be president because of Pat Caddell," said HamiltonJordan, Carter's chief of staff.

In 1992, Bob Teeter was the first pollster to be named manager of a presidential campaign. And the vacuity of the Bush campaign owed much to Teeter's determination to poll every question and issue before coming up with a stand to match the results.

Four years later, the Dole campaign had no overarching vision, choosing instead to run on "three top priorities" created and fine-tuned by extensive polling and focus group testing: pushing for tax cuts, blaming Clinton for teen drug use, and attacking Clinton as a tax-and-spend liberal. They read like those tests your guidance counselor gave you in high school to tell you what career you should have-and were about as successful.

It's a scourge with tragic political consequences-turning our leaders into slavish followers of the most shallow reading of the electorate's whims and wishes.

The election results should have taught Dole and his staffa thing or two about the perils of leading by polling- but ~t seems they derived the wrong lessons from the experience. When it was all over, Tony Fabrizio, Bob Dole's chief pollster (it's now customary to have a small army of them) and a key strategist for the strategy-less '96 campaign, held a post-defeat press conference at the National Press Club to tell the world what-according to his postmortem numbers-the Dole campaign should have said and didn't.

The pollster proclaimed that the 15 percent tax cut Dole ran on "was ill-timed and ill-conceived." But wasn't Fabrizio present at its conception? Or was he ill that day, stricken with a specialized laryngitis that rendered him unable to speak up at any of the several thousand strategy sessions where the tax cut was crafted as the centerpiece of the campaign? Has he ever done a poll on the fave/unfave opinions people have of scapegoaters?

Fabrizio then announced that his polling indicated that there are, in fact, five Republican parties-not one, as we'd all naively assumed. Fabrizio's GOP Quintet was made up of the Deficit Hawks, the Supply-Siders, the Cultural Populists, the Moralists, and the Progressives.

This earth-shattering news was delivered, along with two dozen pages of backup polling data, to all Republican members of the House and Senate, all Republican Party state chairmen and executive directors, GOP governors, and the Republican National Committee leadership.

One hopes they didn't waste their time reading it, but they probably did. The words "supplemental polling data" make politicos, unlike other mortals, jump for their letter openers.

What Republican leaders need is to give their heads a good spring cleaning, not hang old cobwebs in their cranial corners. Fabrizio's Eureka Moment is nothing more than Politics 101 wrapped in charts, graphs, and gimmicky conceptualizing-a multimedia term paper. Every major party is a coalition. And what keeps a coalition from splintering is a solid core more powerful than the individual parts.

After submitting his banal revelation to rigorous numbers-crunching, Fabrizio came up with an eye-opening prescription that is classic GOP boilerplate: Balancing the budget, reducing government spending, and promoting a strong moral climate.

And for this he had to disturb thousands of Americans during dinner? What the Republican Party needs, Fabrizio went on to say, is "a wedge issue that polarizes our way." Wouldn't that make Lincoln proud-a party in search of a "wedge issue"? I think what the Republican Party really needs is fewer pollsters hawking disembodied lmgo and pushing pseudoscientific analyses. Fabrizio and pollsters like him are a major part of the problem, for their livelihood depends on pretending to possess some secret alchemical wisdom that will conjure up gold on voting day. They don't. And the sooner elected offficials making policy and candidates running for office realize this, the more likely they are to find the issues, the vision, and the voice that will move the electorate. The day politicians need pollsters to help them find a "wedge issue" is the day they should turn in their offfice keys, disconnect the phones, and close up shop.

Fabrizio bemoaned the scarcity of urgent issues Republicans could rally around. This is rich. If suburban Republican pollsters bothered to get off the interstate on the~r way to the next focus group, they'd find plenty of urgent issues in our collapsing cities to stir all but the most torpid. But when you talk about poverty or crumbling schools, there's no one to demonize.

"Their symbols were far more powerful than our symbols," Fabrizio whined at his press conference. Apparently, ~t never occurred to him that the Democrats' cosmetic approaches and empty symbolism-the V-chip? school uniforms?-worked at the polls because the empty-headed opposition couldn't muster the merest alternative, and forfeited the match.

As we march into the next century, the motto of every politician seems to be: "I am their leader; I shall follow them."

Both parties, with their scores of poll-tested plans, are unable to beat their addiction. Yet this is a moment when the nation needs leaders with the wisdom to see what does not show up in the polling data, and the passion to build a consensus for reform. In the 1950s, Jacques Soustelle, a close aide to French President Charles de Gaulle, returned from Algiers, where he had taken an informal poll. He told the president that all his friends were bitterly opposed to de Gaulle's policies. "Changez vos amis," de Gaulle responded. Change your friends.

De Gaulle's attitude echoed the sentiments of American political leaders going back to the founding fathers. Representative democracy was intended, inJames Madison's words, to "refine and enlarge the public's views." If we wanted politicians to enslave themselves to opinion polls, we could have followed Ross Perot's suggestion and converted to a referendum state, with the electorate voting on every issue with little electronic boxes, like the audience polls on America's Funiest Home Videos. As it is, we're not much better off. Our modern variation-government by focus groups-exaggerates both the significance of an often blurry snapshot of public opinion and its predictive value.

Poll-quoting has actually become a substitute not only for leadership but for debating and for thinking. We have accustomed ourselves to politicians who, when asked to render the most cursory opinion, reach for the only lifeboat in sight-the latest polling data. I remember Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) being asked by George Will on This Week why Bill Clinton was fit to lead and Bob Packwood wasn't. "I continue to be impressed by the wisdom of the American people," she shot back, substituting the latest polling data for any kind of intellectual argument.

It is interesting how selective our politicians' admiration for the wisdom of the American people can be. I don't remember, for example, Pelosi being overly impressed with the public's wisdom when the majority of Californians approved of Proposition 187 against illegal immigration or of Proposition 209 against affirmative action. Nor did the fact that the majority of the public approved of the president's trip to China prevent her from exercising leadership in opposing it.

Not only do we depend on polls as an alternative to reasoning, we ascribe an almost magical authority to them, though everyone who has ever participated in a poll understands how easily results can vary depending on the wording of the questions, or even the order in which they are asked. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken during the Clinton impeachment crisis, the president's favorability was 39 percent when the question followed one about the First Lady's favorability. It jumped to 56 percent when no question about the current scandal was asked before it, then dropped to 45 percent when a question about the scandal preceded it. Such results are significant, but more for psychology than politics.

And of course there is the well-established tendency of poll respondents to give the socially acceptable answer. In 1980, for example, a sigruficant number of Jews in New York could not bring themselves to admit to pollsters that they were for Ronald Reagan, so they said they planned to vote for Carter; yet Carter, in the end, failed to win a majority of Jewish votes.

Supporters of extreme candidates also lie. Not too many people are eager to admit in public that they'll vote for David Duke, but he always draws more votes than his polling indicates. And blacks are often loath to admit that they would vote against a black candidate. When Doug Wilder was running for governor in Virginia in 1989, polls showed him with much higher support in the black community than his razor-thin victory revealed.

Of course, the industry argues that polls are not supposed to "predict" elections. They are "snapshots" of a given point in time, we are told. If so, the pollsters' 1998 electoral photo album must be filled with images of blurry thumbs.

In a leading Minnesota poll conducted three days before the election, Hubert Humphrey III was beating Jesse Ventura 35 percent to 27 percent. But Ventura put the polling industry in a chokehold. When asked during the National Governors Association meeting what message he had for his fellow governors, Ventura replied: "They can learn from me that the American dream is still alive. They can learn from me: Don't ever believe the polls."

But the pollsters need you to believe in them. "With all due respect," said an unabashed Del Ali of the MasonDixon poll, "I think we were right on the money. One thing a poll is not going to predict is Hillary Clinton coming into California and the voters being as energized as they were." Mason-Dixon's final poll had showed the Boxer/Fong senate race to be a virtual dead heat; Boxer won by a 10-point margin. In polling circles, this is called "right on the money."

Writing for his peers in the "Polling Report," Humphrey Taylor, chairman of Louis Harris & Associates, confessed that, contrary to polling spin, "the possible margin for error is infinite.... All surveys, all opinion polls . . . are estimates, which may be wrong." In the 1998 race in New York for U.S. Senate, John Zogby, acknowledged as one of the more accurate pollsters, showed A1 D'Amato up by 3/lOths of a point on election eve. "I, personally, was kind of mesmerized by history," he said. "I saw him do it in '92 and I probably spun it more D'Amato's way than I should have."

"Spun?" But isn't "spinning" the realm of partisans and pundits, not scientists? Not exactly. As we've seen, polls can be spun in myriad ways-by changing the phrasing or order of the questions, by monkeying with the sample design, by inappropriately weighing the data.

Zogby and Taylor notwithstanding, most pollsters in 1998 blamed not themselves but the voters for not complying with their conclusions: the turnout was too low; the turnout was too high; the unions got their voters to the polls; the Christian Coalition stayed home.

There is also the little matter of the undecided voter, who was rarely mentioned by the media but who, in many instances, became the decisive factor on Election Day. Take the poll that 10 days before the election had Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold losing to Rep. Mark Neumann 43 percent to 46 percent, with 10 percent undecided. The undecided voters broke Feingold's way and turned an incumbent upset into a two-point victory.

Despite these pitfalls, the media remain in thrall to polls' powers of prediction. Lengthy articles are written about such horse-race polls, which are then circulated by handlers and fund-raisers to convince donors and PACs that the other candidates are already out of it. This leads to more money and more endorsements, fewer resources left over for rival candidates, more positive snapshots by the pollsters, and so on, and so on.

Unfortunately, this emphasis on the horse race-often months or years before Election Day-changes the landscape itsel£ Polls showing George W. Bush beating A1 Gore by 20 points or more were used tO build a huge edge in money and endorsements over his nearest Republican rival long before the year 2000 dawned. Polling thus becomes another tool in the hands of the establishment front-runners. Snapshots harden into portraits; predictions become coronations. And reform is pUt off for another time.

But the best reason polls should be relegated to the back of the newspaper, alongside the daily horoscope, is the pollsters' dirty little secret: plummeting response rates ("trending downward," they would say). In what is undoubtedly a response to the mushrooming number of opinion polls and irritating telemarketing calls, an everincreasing number of Americans are expressing their disgust by refusing to participate in telephone polls. Response rates are down to 20 percent in some recent cases, compared to 50 percent or more a decade ago, according to a recent New York Times story.

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Two Parties as One

Both parties seem intent on ignoring the two biggest- and interrelated-crime problems America faces: the exploding prison population and the failure of the war on drugs.

Despite being funded to the tune of $18 billion annually-with another $15 billion spent by state and local governments, the war on drugs has been a disaster.

The proo£? Among other things, a 72 percent increase in drug use among children ages twelve to seventeen since 1992. "Drug use is soaring among our 12th graders," reports Rep. John Mica (R-F1.), Chairman of the House CriminalJustice Subcommittee. "More than 50 percent of them have tried an illicit drug and more than one in four is today a current user." The administration, for itS part, claims a "leveling off)' in teen drug use "after years of dramatic increases." What both parties refuse to address are their misplaced priorities in the drug war.

Only one-third of the Clinton administration's antidrug budget is earmarked for education, prevention, and treatment programs; the remaining two-thirds go to the higher-profile trio of interdiction, supply reduction, and law enforcement. Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), an author of anti-drug laws in Congress, believes the Clinton administration has reneged on its pledge to emphasize education and treatment: "My concern is that the president's budget priorities don't match the rhetoric from the White House."

David Rosenbloom, program director of the Boston community advocacy group Join Together, told Akoholism and Drug Abuse Weekly that "the federal government's continuing emphasis on supply reduction is ineffective and contrary to what most 'in-the-trenches' substance abuse advocates want." It also is the only market in which the government thinks it can suspend the laws of supply and demand.

These misplaced priorities are coupled with the inhumane policy of mandatory-and arbitrary-minimum sentencing. In the name of drug war toughness, mandatory federal sentences of five years without parole are meted out to anyone caught with more than five grams of crack cocaine. To merit the same sentence, you'd need to be caught with five hundred grams of the more upscale powder form of the drug. According to federal sentencing guidelines, first-time cocaine possession is a misdemeanor, punishable by probation (or six months' jail time at the most); first-time crack possession is a felony. And crack is the only drug under the guidelines subject to mandatory sentences for possession.

This has disproportionately affected the "other nation." The percentage of African-American men who have been arrested for drug crimes has tripled over the last twenty years. Black men are arrested for drugs five times as often as white men, even though only 13 percent of all monthly drug users are African American, according to federal statistics. And according to the Justice Department, almost 60 percent of the people serving time in state prisons for drug offenses are black. The result is appalling: One out of fourteen black men in America is in prison or jail, sure to face economic and social disenfranchisement when he does return to society.

Thanks in part to mandatory minimum sentencing, our drug war's casualties have also been predominantly nonviolent users. Nearly eight out of ten recently sentenced inmates have been sentenced for nonviolent offenses, according to the Justice Policy Institute. And in 1997, 80 percent of drug arrests were for possessing drugs, not selling them.

A look at individual states is equally depressing. According to the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, over eight out of ten inmates serving mandatory sentences on drug charges are first-time offenders. The inmates, overwhelmingly black or Hispanic, are serving an average of five years-about one year longer than the average violent criminal. In New York, 95 percent of inmates incarcerated for drug offenses were black or Hispanic.

Over the last two decades, the number of incarcerated drug offenders has skyrocketed from one out of every sixteen inmates in state prisons to nearly one out of four, according to the Sentencing Project. In federal prisons, the percentage of drug offender inmates has climbed to 60 percent.

Overall, our state and federal jails are currently holding nearly two million inmates, despite a violent crime rate that has fallen to a thirty-year low. By the end of 1998, our federal prisons were filled to 27 percent overcapacity; in terms of incarceration rates, the U.S. is now second only to Russia. Given how expensive it is to build enough prisons, this has become our new space race.

An American Bar Association report last February [1999] found that despite increased arrests for drug possession- up 73 percent from 1992 to 1997-and higher incarceration rates-the number of users has risen to 14 million people.

"Of all the things I was involved in during my nine years on the House Judiciary Committee, my role in the creation of mandatory minimums was absolutely the worst, the most counterproductive, the most unjust," says Eric Sterling, a former congressional lawyer who wrote the federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws in 1986. "Thousands of men and women are serving many years in prisons unjustly as a consequence of these laws." Even law-and-order conservatives-including Supreme Court Chief Justice W~lliam Rehnquist and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, and criminologist John DiIulio-are reconsidering. "There is a conservative crime-control case to be made for repealing all mandatory-minimum laws now," DiIulio wrote in National Review. "W~th mandatory minimums, there is no real suppression of the drug trade, only episodic substance-abuse treatment of incarcerated drugonly offenders, and hence only the most tenuous crimecontrol rationale."

"It seemed like a good idea twenty-five years ago, but the sad fact is they haven't worked," says former Bush Assistant Attorney General and New York State Senator John Dunne, a Republican who coauthored one of the nation's first mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws in 1973. "They're ineffective, unfair and extremely costly to taxpayers." Nevertheless, only a handful of members of Congress have had the guts to cosponsor Rep. Maxine Waters's (D-Calif.) bill to abolish federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses.

Millions of underprivileged minors are crowding our prisons, all the result of crowd-pleasing but cowardly sentencing laws. This is modern politics at its worst. Such bad policy, defended on fraudulent grounds by both parties, can only serve to erode the public's already shaky trust in democracy.

How to Overthrow the Government

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