“You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America”

From Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: Rick MacArthur, you talk a lot about the fundraising and the historic precedent for the Obama fundraising machine. You go back further than Howard Dean and John McCain. Explain how it works.

RICK MacARTHUR: Well, the fundraising machine goes back—I mean, when they banned so-called soft money, the whole—when they banned the direct contributions of above a certain amount after the Watergate reforms of the ’70s, the two parties had to figure out new ways to raise money. But what they’ve done, by bundling and political action committees and so on and so forth and going to big business, is to arrange a system where it’s like something—it’s a term they use in business school. They talk about barriers to entry. In other words, a company sets up—if you want to go into competition against the dominant company in your sector, in your market, there are barriers to entry, and you have to analyze the barriers to entry. The barriers to entry to politics in the United States are—the principal one is that you cannot raise money on the level of an incumbent congressman or an incumbent politician. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party raise so much money now that you or I or somebody off the street who is serious about politics simply cannot enter the political process anymore.

Now, in the Democratic Party, this wasn’t as stark until the ’90s, when Bill Clinton really pioneered corporate fundraising on a level with the Republicans. He did this by, of course, supporting NAFTA and free trade agreements that made big American corporations happy—international financiers, commercial banks, investment banks and so on. And what Barack Obama has done is to copy the Clintons.

Click here to watch, read, or listen to the rest.

The rest of the conversation goes deeply into how Barack Obama is one of the great Democratic panderers to big business, and far more loyal to the political establishment than to the liberal supporters who believe in his "hope" and "change." But this bit excerpted above is worth noting in itself especially because it well illustrates that the Democrats are simply incapable of running a liberal for President. That is, the problem isn't with Obama, who is doing exactly what he needs to do to win the White House: rather, the problem is with the Democratic Party, and more generally with the entire political establishment, encompassing both parties.

American politics, at the electoral level, is no longer about ideas. It's about money, about raising vast sums of money, and spending it on marketing campaigns. Not political campaigns, marketing campaigns--political campaigns are about ideas; marketing campaigns are about brand names, about establishing "differences" between amazingly similar products like Coke and Pepsi, or McDonald's and Burger King, or McCain and Obama.

And these marketing campaigns are on a massive scale, every bit the same as Chevy and Ford, or any other massive corporate market fight. It's not for the people anymore, and when I say "people," I mean people like you and me, people who live in relative obscurity, people who worry about the bills. Politics isn't for us. It's for them. They need money, not votes, because money will eventually buy the votes via marketing anyway, and we don't have the kind of money they need, so we're essentially irrelevant to the entire process, both before and after election.

You can't be President, and neither can I. Tell that to your kids because it's the truth.

And as MacArthur observes in the interview, money is only one barrier keeping the American people from participating in electoral politics. The dual party system is another that comes instantly to mind, battling fiercely and sometimes illegally to lock third party and independent candidates out of debates and off the ballots. It's just awful.

I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it many times again: the American experiment in democracy is over. And it's been over for some years now.

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