Too Much Funding Should Be a Campaign Liability

Some free advice to the Bernie Sanders campaign: focus on making it a bad thing in the public eye when a candidate has too large a war chest and is unwilling to disclose exactly from where the donations came.

I know; everybody has a wish list for the Bernie campaign, but this messaging effort will be crucial before anything else even has a chance to be heard.

According to the New York Times, FEC Chairwoman, Ann M. Ravel is predicting a full-on Wild West of campaign finance corruption for 2016, with zero possibility of intervention by the FEC.  The system is irreparably damaged, and it will take a mass rejection by voters of the funding message to bring about any meaningful change.

Here is your opening, Senator.  If all of us, and you most especially, focus on campaign finance issues as a key component of the get-out-the-vote message, there is a chance…just a chance…that we might, by the power of the vote itself, begin the country’s move down the path to genuine reform.

Every time the media trumpets who has the biggest war chest in any campaign, we should be responding with questions as to how that war chest breaks down in terms of corporate and individual contributions.  What is the average size of those contributions and what has been disclosed as to who the biggest funders are?

Never mind just satisfying the rule of law; If those answers are not forthcoming, make it a defining negative for the candidate to have too much money in the race.

You, Senator Sanders, are the only candidate who is likely to have a public enough platform to make that case despite your own funding challenges, because you have built credibility amongst a populist following like none other.

If you succeed in nothing more than making that message stick, you will have lanced the boil that putrefies our body politic.

About Sue Prent

Artist/Writer/Activist living in St. Albans, Vermont with my husband since 1983. I was born in Chicago; moved to Montreal in 1969; lived there and in Berlin, W. Germany until we finally settled in St. Albans.

One thought on “Too Much Funding Should Be a Campaign Liability

  1. How’s this for rule-based strategic voting: Never, under any circumstances, vote for a candidate with an average donation amount over 8 hours at the federal minimum wage, or $58. (Bernie’s average was $43)

    What would be the outcome of widespread adoption of this? Candidates would have to reject large donations and seek out ordinary people to donate. It would naturally limit the overall fundraising amounts.

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