LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Dear Editor,

Give me 10 years of public statements by the Pope and I’ll find a Washington spin doctor that, in a 15 second attack ad, can make him sound evil. (No sacrilege intended.) They’re that good.

Politics and elections used to be grassroots; yard signs and door-to-door campaigning. Meet the candidate, have a cup of coffee and a real discussion. Now, it’s spin doctors, attack ads, hate mail and robo-calling.

Seven weeks prior to the 2012 contest between Mr. Romney and President Obama, the election was narrowed down to eight counties. (Business Insider, Sept. 23, 2012). Some strategists claimed they’d narrowed it down to one county in Ohio. Political scientists armed with polling data have elections down to a science.

Our current system discourages the best and brightest from public service. Who would want to expose their families and themselves to the scrutiny of a campaign and the 24 hour news cycle? Secondly, who wants to spend 75 percent of their time begging for money from wealthy donors that they don’t even know?

The average cost for a U.S. Senate seat in the 2012 election cycle was $10.5 million. Let’s put that into perspective. Assuming two weeks’ vacation per year, that leaves 300 work weeks or 1,500 days in a six-year term. The incumbent has to raise an astonishing

$7,000 per day to fund his or her re-election. I’ll take it further than that; 8-hour workday, $875 per hour in fundraising. That’s absurd.

A seat in the U.S. House of Representatives sounds cheap by that measure. It only costs $1.7 million for a two-year stint. Using the same math, the candidate only has to raise $3,400 per day or $425 per hour. And that figure doesn’t count ‘soft’ money and 501(c)(4) groups (super PAC’s); that amount we’ll never know. (Analysis by Maplight.org of data from the Federal Elections Commission. New York Daily News, March 11, 2013).

Am I the only one that thinks there’s a problem here?

Food for thought.