With all of this talk of economic meltdown, I thought I would share an article that a friend of mine told me about today.
It’s old, (April 2008) but I think it’s more relevent now. Our economy is broken. The country that goes green the quickest will be the next world leader.
Thomas Friedman: Dumb as We Wanna Be
Published: April 30, 2008
Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country. Read More
Sean Tevis is running for office in Kansas. He’s progressive, running against a staunch conservative in a red state. In American politics it takes money and name recognition to win. Sean had neither. He changed that with a simple website with an appeal to the masses.
All it took was a comic with a little humor and a little bit about what he believed in with a website that called the average person to a simple action. Sean asked for 3000 people to donate $8.34. Using this dead-simple tactic, Sean Tevis has already gotten over 4,600 people to donate.
This kind of campaign raises some interesting questions. For example, should a resident of Georgia be able to donate to a resident of Kansas? Even a year ago the answer to that would be most certainly, but I think this starts to push the scales in the other direction. A campaign financed on the success of a single comic strip due to the donations of non-constitutions doesn’t seem very democratic, does it?
Is it good for a constituency that someone good at internet marketing can, for lack of a better word,”;win” them? While the Internet is fueling a new age of innovation and economics, even after the dot com boom and bust, that certainly does not necessitate being a good public official. Further, his successful internet campaign will lead to loads of stories in more traditional, local media. If it’s true that people only vote on name recognition, then this is great news for Sean Tevis regardless of what the stories say about him.
These are interesting issues, but it all boils down to that money buys votes. If you have the money to buy the right ads, the right posters, the right website, you can win an election. With the internet, getting 3,000 people to give you less than 9 dollars is childs play. The question is, are we looking at a precedent in campaign finance or a sign that our election system has a flaw?
-Jason
