That was the main message of Zócalo’s first event of 2016, a talk by Richard L. Hasen, the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections. In front of a full house at Los Angeles’s Grand Central Market, Hasen broke down the nuances and complexities that are often missed in discussions of campaign finance, and what he believes are the key steps to limiting money’s current outsized influence on the political process.

Hasen opened with an anecdote about the power America’s wealthiest campaign donors have over presidential hopefuls: In early 2014, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie accidentally upset billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a prominent supporter of Republican candidates, by using the phrase “occupied territories” in discussing areas like Israel’s West Bank. Christie hastily apologized, meeting with Sheldon, a conservative Zionist, in private to clarify his support of Israel.

Who could blame Christie the candidate, asked Hasen, for his obsequiousness? Adelson represents a small group of super-elites who contribute most of the money that goes into presidential campaigns. In the first part of the 2016 election campaign cycle (through June 2015), just 158 families and the companies they own or control contributed nearly half the funds that were raised to support presidential candidates. Adelson himself spent upward of $150 million on the 2012 election—only a third of which was reported to the Federal Election Commission.

And yet, Hasen pointed out, the Republicans who raise the most money aren’t winning elections. Newt Gingrich, a huge beneficiary of Adelson’s spending in the 2012 presidential race, didn’t become president. Jeb Bush, whose super PAC raised more money in the first half of 2015 than President Obama’s main super PAC did for the entire 2012 election cycle, still trails in popularity behind Donald Trump, who has spent just a fraction of Bush’s campaign.

This goes to show, said Hasen, that money isn’t corrupting 21st-century elections in the way that liberals claim it has since the landmark 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission removed restrictions on campaign financing. “The new Citizens United era is not full of politicians taking bribes or elections going to the highest bidder. To claim this puts the spotlight in the wrong place,” he explained. “The more central problem of money in politics is something just as troubling, but a lot harder to see. It’s a system in which economic inequalities, inevitable in a free market economy, are transformed into political inequalities that affect both electoral and legislative outcomes.”

He went on to detail how this system plays out in subtle, granular ways. Money skews public policy toward the interest of the wealthiest political donors, for instance. Even the threat of big money being spent against a person or cause is enough to influence policies, Hasen contended.

And while expensive advertising alone isn’t enough to sway well-informed and engaged voters, “we know that in a close election, advertising can swing voters, who are generally the least informed,” he said. And that can influence election outcomes.

Hasen contended that money’s influence on politics is only growing and creating greater inequality. But there are ways to reform the way we handle money in politics—without completely overturning the Citizens United ruling.

The challenge, Hasen said, is toeing the line between promoting political equality and “not squelching too much political speech”—i.e., imposing censorship. He proposes creating a voucher system in which every voter in an election is given $200 to donate to whatever campaigns and interest groups they please. The idea is to guarantee public funding that goes into what people actually care about.

On top of this voucher system, Hasen would like to impose a $25,000 cap on campaign spending per federal election—and a $500,000 cap per two-year election cycle. This limit would apply to candidates themselves, and any combination of individuals’ contributions to organizations and direct contributions. Overall, the limit would affect very few voters, but would keep the exclusive group that has an outsized influence in check.

In a lively question-and-answer session, Hasen elaborated on his vision for change, reflected on the media’s importance in educating voters, and underscored how important the upcoming election is in determining the country’s future—largely because of the influence it will have on the Supreme Court. Considering the advancing age of many of the justices, the next president is likely to appoint multiple new members, which Hasen notes will give the president immense power over many issues, including election financing.

“No one pays attention to the Supreme Court,” he said. “But if you think of all the hot-button issues, it all goes through the Supreme Court.”

If Hasen had to boil his overall project down to a single mission, he said, it would be “trying to show these new justices that the time has come to rethink 40 years of mistakes, and to accept that political equality is a reason for limiting money in elections, so long as it can be done in a way that has the ability to protect First Amendment rights of political competition.”

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But to what extent can money buy power? Dismantling campaign finance laws can create more incentive for candidates to bend their will to the people who write the biggest checks. Yet money on its own clearly isn’t enough to win a presidential race. Jeb Bush’s super PAC has raised more money in the first half of 2015 than President Obama’s main super PAC did for the entire 2012 election cycle. But Bush is still trailing behind Donald Trump, whose media attention has allowed him to spend just a fraction of Bush’s costs on his campaign.

So when does money go from being necessary for a candidate’s voice to be heard to corrupting the political process? In advance of a January 12 Zócalo event, “What Will the Presidential Elections Cost Us?”, we asked a variety of political analysts: How can we mitigate the effects of “big money” on American politics?

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Forget all that talk about the wisdom of voters, and the great American people. We are the problem, with our shrill, hyperbolic, extremist, intolerant, and polarized ways of engaging in politics over the past two decades.

I can recall in the late ’90s being totally befuddled by how some of my friends, perfectly sensible people when the subject wasn’t politics, would go apoplectic at the mere mention of Bill Clinton.

Our president, I can recall a Michigan banker friend named John telling me, was a socialist, a dishonorable man intent on destroying America. John would practically start shaking when discussing Clinton and the need for the cretin to be removed from office. I couldn’t understand where all this vitriol came from. To what water cooler did he retreat to where such views were the norm? (A clue: I think it was from him that I first heard of Fox News).

Sure, Clinton had his personal weaknesses (almost clichés for a politico, though, which in other eras would not likely have led to impeachment proceedings). But as far as I could see, the president was overseeing a massive economic boom (deregulating John’s banking industry along the way), taking on Democratic unions to push for free trade agreements, balancing the federal budget, and deploying U.S. forces overseas, when required, in places like Kosovo and Iraq. How did all that make Bill Clinton a crazed socialist?

I was equally perplexed by the irrational level of contempt and vitriol leftist friends and colleagues felt towards George W. Bush late in his first term, and throughout his second term. The man was a fascist, they’d say, amid wishful talk of impeachment. I, too, disagreed with much of what Bush did, and worried about that administration’s competence, but the criticism among impassioned liberals, congregating online at a new crop of progressive websites and watching MSNBC and Jon Stewart, was absurdly over the top.

The facts, once again, were becoming awfully elastic and selectively parsed. Take the war in Iraq. Within a couple of years of the 2003 invasion, Democrats talked about the war as a secretive, despicable Bush plot. Never mind that plenty of Democrats supported the initial decision to go to war, and that there had been little daylight between the Clinton national security team’s assessment of Saddam Hussein’s behavior, capabilities, and intentions, and the assessment of the Bush team.

What was becoming clear, however, is that we Americans—specifically the more politically engaged among us—have been losing our ability to respectfully and constructively disagree with governing leaders of a different party, not to mention with each other. Instead of opposing certain policies of a president we don’t see eye to eye with, we jump to questioning that president’s legitimacy to even hold the office, to represent us.

Of course, this psychosis has been most pronounced during President Barack Obama’s administration, when plenty of Republicans have repeatedly questioned the president’s birthplace and religion. And, once again, the extremist rhetoric portraying him as a feckless socialist seems far removed from facts, when you consider how he responded to the financial crisis by shoring up banking institutions without taking them over, embraced a moderate market-based approach to healthcare reform (instead of a single-payer approach), and ratcheted up the drone campaigns against terrorists in countries like Yemen and Pakistan. There’s plenty to disagree with Obama on, and I understand conservatives’ ire at Obamacare and some of his progressive social agenda. But isn’t there a way to oppose the president without ridiculing the man, questioning his patriotism, and denying his legitimacy as a twice-elected leader of the free world?

The anecdotal sense that we have become a far more polarized society was borne out last year by the largest political survey ever conducted by the Pew Research Center. The survey found that Republicans and Democrats are further apart ideologically than at any point in recent history; that the two parties no longer overlapped in any meaningful way; that, in 20 years, the share of Americans expressing consistently across-the-board conservative or liberal positions had doubled, as had the percentage of Republicans and Democrats holding “very unfavorable” views of the other party. The study also found that more and more of us are hiding out in our hardened ideological silos, increasingly segregated from fellow citizens and media that don’t share our worldview. And by worldview, we no longer seem to be talking solely about one’s interpretation of objective facts, but one’s subjective choice of facts.

My list of causes for this would include the end of the Cold War (the daily threat of nuclear extinction didn’t allow for self-destructive partisanship); the balkanization of media, aided by the advent of the Internet; the takeover of politics by the fundraising-industrial complex (it’s much easier to raise money if you’re screaming that you’re fighting a danger to the republic rather than a well-meaning, if misguided, friend from the other side of the aisle); and the poisoning of the idea that Washington is a permanent home where our representatives should live, mingle, and learn to get along.

Choose your favorite polarizing culprits from that list, or add others to it, but there is no denying that we’ve landed at an ugly moment on the eve of the 2016 vote. Recent primaries have featured early “silly seasons” when voters have flirted with absurd candidacies before sobering up. But now the silly season is threatening to spill over into the actual voting process.

Let’s stipulate the obvious: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders are beyond the pale. In a more serious time, they never would have been considered credible candidates in a national election. Only in silos of same-thinking dogmatism is this not obvious. Trump, in particular, has masterfully capitalized on the cultural moment, turning into a fascist demagogue before our eyes, exhorting people to channel their anger with the status quo and “Make America Great Again” by bullying foreigners and minorities, those “others” who are to blame for all our woes. His candidacy embodies and fulfills the hysterical tenor of our political discourse. He is our political Frankenstein. If we elect Donald Trump president, half the country’s cries that our president is a fascist unfit for office will—for once—be no exaggeration.

The Republicans don’t have a monopoly on a lack of seriousness. Sanders is not leading in the polls, but the fact that so many Democrats treat him as a legitimate choice is alarming. When the self-avowed Socialist (again, real life is catching up with our once exaggerated epithets) was asked in a recent debate how high he’d like to raise income tax rates if elected, he vaguely joked that they wouldn’t go higher than 90 percent. Hillary Clinton is in a different league, credibility-wise, but our debased political culture is forcing her into some intellectually dishonest contortions. So, for instance, she had to come out against President Obama’s Asian trade pact (which she championed and negotiated as Secretary of State) because the “base” these days won’t tolerate any deviance from its dogma or overlap between the parties. It all boils down to “us” versus “them.”

There is that old aphorism (often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, but of uncertain origins) that, in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. We must have a reckoning with ourselves, as voters and citizens. It’s great fun to sit back and mock, or demonize, these presidential candidates, but they aren’t the underlying problem. We are.

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That should change. We all need more feedback on those who represent, or seek to represent, us. Since Americans are, for the most part, in between campaigns, now is the perfect time to build out a website to provide the public with something almost unheard of—useful information about politicians.

Modern campaigns are dominated by less-than-helpful advertisements. In the run-up to elections, our televisions and radios carry ads extolling the virtues, or warning of the vices, of our candidates. Our mailboxes, both real and virtual, brim with mailers explaining why we absolutely must not, under any circumstances, vote for a particular candidate. But very few of these campaign missives contain independent, factual information; campaigns, after all, aim primarily to get you to go to the polls, not to undertake a searching review of candidates.

This lack of helpful, substantive information leaves an ill-informed electorate grasping for answers. What is the solution? Here is one suggestion. Let’s create a dynamic website that would allow us to review our politicians based on a number of objective factors. And unlike well-intentioned but snoozy websites (I’m looking at you, League of Women Voters) that provide constituents with information on politicians, let’s promote a robust comment and ranking system.

There are many ways to review and rank politicians, and this site should cover them all. First, the site should describe every politician’s views on a broad but uniform set of issues, both domestic and international: immigration, taxes, education, foreign policy, the budget, and others. This would resemble the restaurant section on Yelp, which includes the hours, price, type of cuisine, requested attire and other items for all listed eateries. Whether you want a politician in favor of a path to citizenship and school vouchers—or an Indian restaurant that is good for kids and has outdoor seating —you’d be covered.

Second, just as on Yelp, there would be a comment section. Did you receive mediocre service at the neighborhood Chinese restaurant? Did your city councilmember return your call or respond to your request to fix the potholes on your street? Now there is a place to share your experiences.

But this raises a larger question: Do enough of us interact with our candidates and elected officials to be able to review them?

Yelp is based, at least in part, on the premise that local businesses are accessible.

Of the various filters to use when searching on Yelp, a popular one is price. When pricier restaurants, hotels, or businesses are out of reach for Yelp users, they can click on a single dollar sign to indicate they want to search for businesses on the lower end of the price range.

In an ideal world, politicians are accessible to all of their constituents, or all of their would-be constituents. But, thanks in large part to the U.S. Supreme Court and less-than-gutsy legislators, today’s reality is that those who can pay—campaign donors and outside spenders—are the only people who have regular access to politicians. Too many of our politicians are akin to the four-dollar sign restaurants on Yelp: They are open only to a select few.

Could we rate politicians according to cost, as we already do steakhouses? Yes, we could. I can think of a variety of “cost measures” for politicians. One might be based on campaign fundraising; politicians could be rated on how much money they raised and spent in campaigns. Or we could rate them on the median amount of the campaign donations they receive.

Making such information available would raise questions about the accessibility of these more “expensive” politicians. How big of a donation does it usually take to get a meeting? Are there some politicians who score big contributions but who still make time for those who can’t or don’t provide monetary support? Are politicians who raise very small amounts from many people really accessible—or are they too busy fundraising?

Yelp, via constituent comments and ratings, could answer such questions in ways that serve access-seeking constituents and the broader public. The service would also create an incentive for politicians to be accessible and responsive. We know that interest groups from the National Rifle Association to the Sierra Club rate politicians by their votes on certain issues as a means of getting more of the results they want. Why shouldn’t the rest of us get in on the game?

Yelp sells itself as “the best way to find great local businesses.” Why can’t a similar site be the “best way to find great politicians?”

The post I’d Like a Politician With Values and a Steakhouse With Outdoor Seating appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Lessig, author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, talks with Anne-Marie Slaughter about the nature of copyright in our share culture as well as how campaign money can help explain the government shutdown. Wilson Center Senior Advisor to the Mexico Institute Andrew Selee, New America Foundation Future Tense Fellow Konstantin Kakaes, and New America Associate Editor Elizabeth Weingarten join New America and Zócalo Editorial Director Andrés Martinez to discuss how the American media is portraying Mexico’s current political moment.

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Political scientist Samuel L. Popkin, author of The Candidate: What it Takes to Win—and Hold—the White House, has studied candidates who have lost presidential elections in order to find out who wins and why. People tend to think that a campaign story is about good triumphing over evil, or vice versa, he said. But if you narrate instead how an election could have gone the other way, and where a campaign could have succeeded, you can learn something new. Popkin believes that Romney is losing the current election, owing to missteps like having lurched too far to the right in the primary season in order to neutralize candidates who weren’t viable anyway.

How an election is run is just as important as the foibles of a candidate. According to campaign finance expert Richard L. Hasen, author of The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, the “Election Administrator’s Prayer” is, “Lord, let this election not be close.” Close elections cause controversy. We have not, he said, solved any of the problems of Florida in 2000—except for fixing the voting machines. The primary challenge is that America still has partisans in charge of elections. The way things stand now, our system is “a powder keg, and social media makes things worse,” said Hasen. He hopes this election doesn’t come down to counting votes in Ohio or Florida; if we have another Florida 2000, he believes that protests might move from Twitter onto the streets. And even if this year’s race ultimately isn’t tight, we’ve had a number of close statewide elections in the past decade—and could have another close national election in 2016 or 2020.

Mathews asked Hasen if he thinks money is driving our election dysfunction.

Although money is a real problem in politics, Hasen thinks the root of dysfunction in our voting process is firmly rooted in partisanship. Every other mature democracy, he said, has national elections administered by nonpartisan officials. But in America, election reform has only happened along party lines—and Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on anything, voting included.

However, said Popkin, “The parties are often wrong about particular laws, and whether they will help or hurt them.” Republicans opposed “motor voter” legislation to register voters who are renewing or applying for a driver’s license—but they benefited from these laws because of demographics. (In more Democratic cities, people don’t drive; in the South, they drive more.)

Turning to the subject of campaign finance, Mathews noted that donations to presidential campaigns by the rich and wealthy alike have increased, thanks to the Internet and the Super PACs. Mathews asked the candidates if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Would they be more inclined to take Wallis Simpson’s view that you can never be too rich or too thin, or Biggie Smalls’s belief that more money equals more problems?

Popkin said that campaign fundraising has become “an arms race”; no one wants to stop until the other side stops. The money won’t get out of politics until candidates are prevented from spending all of their own money on their campaigns, he said.

Hasen doesn’t think the amount of money is the problem. “The problem is where the money comes from and what the cause is,” he said. He’s less worried about donations to presidential races, where a couple million dollars won’t win a donor any favors. But in Congressional races, just one donor can make a big difference. “The smaller the race, the more skew that’s going to come from the money,” he said.

Popkin agreed that no one can buy a revocation of Roe v. Wade or the end of the Clean Air Act—but little regulations can swing millions. Richard Nixon’s campaign, for instance, got support from a carpet manufacturer in exchange for not raising the percentage of wool that was needed to label a carpet “wool.”

Returning to the current election, Mathews asked Popkin how the candidates are doing when it comes to discussing money; President Obama has bungled the conversation about debt, and Romney has bungled the conversation about his work at Bain.

Popkin said that Obama should have spent more time talking about jobs and about how long it takes to recover from a financial crisis. And Romney could have spun his work at Bain into a qualification for office—knowledge of how the government and big business can work together—rather than a liability.

Turning to Hasen, Mathews asked where the holes are in our voting system. How do you steal an election?

Hasen said that the amount of voter fraud in America is low; it’s a dumb and complicated way to steal an election. You’re better off being the person who counts the votes—or committing absentee ballot fraud. Rather than implementing voter identification laws, the best way to combat fraud would be to eliminate voting by mail, he said.

So with all these risks and the immense cost of a national election, is the presidency just a bad idea?

The president is a fantasy, said Popkin. The president thinks he’ll get into office, effect change, and fulfill his campaign promises. But it’s not that easy. The president is surrounded by adversarial legislators, for one thing. And in reality, “you get there and you find out, you’re a senator with 17 votes who can push a red button.”

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