Hopefully this will be a lesson for anyone else who wants to BUY an election.
Oh I don't know, it seems to have been working pretty well for the mega-rich Republican financiers so far.
I'm still waiting for the candidate to come forward and announce he will only accept funding from the individual contributor up to the maximum level they can donate (which is what, $2000 or something?). I wonder how well that would play out during an election if they shunned all corporate, special interest, and any other large third-party donations from their campaigns.
Probably not very well, really. I mean, how likely would you be to swing your vote just based on that? It's probably more effort than the end results would justify. After all, it would entirely frame the campaign, but people would get sick of hearing about it.
The problem is in reaching a large audience, especially an audience that knows little about the person.
Suppose I had just invented great new formula for toothpaste. My local community would be enthusiastic, but the market would be pretty restricted to word-of-mouth advertising. If I wanted to challenge for a bigger market I would need to advertise on a broad scale that would reach enough people to justify the expense. Newspapers outside of my local area aren't going to give me free media time, less so for TV markets beyond those interested in the "local inventor" angle. A public stock offering may not grab much attention, so I go for a handful of venture capitalists to underwrite the first widescale ads.
Marketing a candidate is not dissimilar. One needs to get the message of the person out to a wide audience beyond a local base. There's no cheap, dependable way to do that.
