Voters Lose When Money Men Prevail

As the 1988 marathon for the Democratic nomination progresses, it is increasingly clear that money, and not voter appeal, is determining which candidate gets to go the distance. And that spells trouble for the Democrats in November.

The Democratic Party’s basic contradiction is that it is supposed to be the party of the little guy, but it has to raise its money largely from big guys. This tends to generate candidates whom the money men feel comfortable with, but these are not necessarily the candidates most attractive to base Democratic voters.

So far, the early primaries have done their job of narrowing down the field. But to a large extent, the narrowing has been based on who remained financially competitive, not on who offered the most appealing message.

Might Bruce Babbitt have caught fire, with his campaign of intellectual seriousness and his willingness to spell out hard choices? We’ll never know. Babbitt ran out of money.

Sen. Joe Biden was a magnet for campaign professionals early in the race, because of his proven ability to raise big money. His abrupt departure from the race, after the Neil Kinnock tape affair, was dictated partly because the money men lost confidence and advised Biden to get out. Would the voters have forgiven him? Sorry, we can’t answer that.

Rep. Richard Gephardt seemed to be onto something, with his message of economic populism. In Iowa and New Hampshire, his campaign attracted many blue-collar Democrats, of the sort who had voted for Ronald Reagan.

But Gephardt failed to raise the money to run a financially competitive campaign in the South. It’s not clear whether his message ran out of steam Super Tuesday, or just out of money. But it is clear that Gephardt lacked the money to let voters know what the message was.

In Illinois, Al Gore, the surprise Super Tuesday winner, failed to get out of single digits. Was his problem lack of money? Or lack of a clear theme? We don’t quite know. But Gore’s relative poverty will make a comeback much harder.

The Democrats’ champion money raiser this year is, of course, Michael Dukakis. He has never quite been the front-runner with the voters that the press has proclaimed; at this moment, he is almost tied with Jesse Jackson in total popular votes, and barely ahead of Jackson and Gore in the delegate count. But he certainly has been the front-runner at fund raising.

Dukakis is the safe haven where the party’s smart money has headed. As of the Federal Election Commission’s February filing, Dukakis had raised $4.3 million, or more than Gore and Gephardt had raised put together. His eligibility for matching funds was double that of the next candidate in the field, and his cash on hand, on the eve of the first primaries, was just over $4 million, to Gephardt’s $173,000.

When money drives politics, the voters become pawns. Money purchases TV spots. Voters get to “know” the candidate who has saturated the airwaves. And money thus buys votes.

But a politics driven by money raising and media buys often fails to purchase real allegiance.

The great exception to money politics this year, Jesse Jackson, has a genuine bond with his supporters that money simply can’t buy.

What is clear is that the Democratic party has exchanged one set of kingmakers --the old fashioned party bosses--for a new group of bosses: the money men.

The old bosses had one virtue. They were close to the party’s blue-collar base. The new bosses, the thousand-dollar contributors, are likely to be real estate moguls, and investment bankers, or other upscale Democrats who are liberal on such issues as Central America, and environmentalism, and abortion, but who have little in common with Joe Sixpack.

If Dukakis wins the nomination, he needs to move beyond a politics of inevitability measured by fund-raising success. It is not Dukakis’ personality that bores working-class voters, but his message. Dukakis needs something of Jesse Jackson’s rapport with voters who are hurting economically. And that, alas, is not what his money men are investing in.