A spate of news stories and blogs are declaring that President elect Barak Obama bought the presidency for $650 million, a point I dispute (see Big Money Bought Obama the White House or £500m election fund 'bought Obama victory').
The stories are of two types, by raising so much money Mr. Obama was able to bamboozle voters with tons of TV, radio and other advertising, or that the money was somehow illegally raised. As to the second point, illegally raising money, I will only comment briefly. Mr. Obama should comply with the law no matter how difficult the compliance and stupid the law. Without any evidence, I believe that when all is said and done, Mr. Obama will be shown to have complied with the law about as well as anyone else.
Money and votes seem to be correlated, but the question is one of causality. Does money buy votes or do good candidates raise more money. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner answer that question based on Levitt's peer reviewed work in their best seller, Freakonomics, certainly a valuable and entertaining read. Levitt looked at elections in which the same congressional candidates ran against each other in consecutive elections. This happened a lot, over 1,000 times in his sample.
Levitt then compared the votes and money raised in the two elections. He found that a candidate can cut his or her spending in half and only lose about one percent of the votes. Candidate Obama won by a 7.2 percent spread. It wasn't even close. Mr. Obama won because, given the economic and social conditions, he was the better candidate.
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No, President Elect-Obama did not buy the election, and the sad reality is that there are people in our society that would rather believe that the Obama campaign paid for votes rather than give credit to Americans who decided to stand up and vote for change. Obama won the presidency because average American voters like you and I believed and donated for change. Obama received more funding from average citizens than any other candidate to ever run a presidential race.
ReplyDeletehey..every candidate EVER has campaigned, or spent money to get his voice heard..so if it is said that Obama bought the election, so did every other president of the United States..His campaign could not have prospered without funds..but funds are fundamentally supported by the public (this is rightful under a little thing called the Bill of Rights)..
ReplyDeleteObama had an incredible campaign strategy- his team looked for what would be the most appealing to those who are having the roughest time- financially, morally, and even spiritually..and fed off of their needs, wants, aspirations.
This won America over. Needless to say..the camera loved him.
Obamas not the villian, he's got a plan for us...he's helping the dollar, he's got a bail out plan, and he is increasing grants all over the place!
ReplyDeleteObama is helping us by lowering the cost of money for everyone and increasing grant funds, but I really don't think that he bought his presidency. He won by too much to have done that.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Kristi Lanmon about how he won by too much to buy the election. But i don't think his plan on change is going to work just make it worst.
ReplyDeleteThe money may not have bought him the election; however, it did provide insight about his character. He seemed to have no reservations about breaking his promise to accept federal campaign financing. Integrity matters.
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