The $1 Billion Race, or, How I Became President While The Rest of America Lost Their Homes

Has anyone stopped to ponder just how much this presidential campaign is costing, has cost, will cost? The numbers are staggering. It seems no month can go by without hearing of another record breaking fundraising milestone.

In November, we heard how Ron Paul raised $4.3 million dollars in one day in a gimmicky fundraising online campaign (who is Guy Fawkes again?), breaking a GOP record, then broke Kerry’s 2004, $5.7 million 24 hour online fundraising record just a month later by raising almost $6 million, yet again using a gimmicky historical bite, this time the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

Barack “the Million Dollar a Day Man” Obama scored big last month raising $32 million dollars in 31 days, more than any other candidate has ever raised in one month at this point in the presidential campaign season.

The prediction this time around is that by November 4, 2008, over $1 billion dollars will be raised and spent trying to elect someone who will earn an annual salary of only $400,000.00. It seems the investment does not match the return, but then Michael Bloomberg spent $100 million dollars of his own money to become mayor of New York – another record breaker – only to reduce his salary to $1.00 per year, or just $.93 per year after taxes.

More money has been raised already at this point than in all the other races from 1976 to 2004. In 2004, the total price tag came to $880.5 million raised and $717.9 million spent. Last year, the presidential candidates for 2008 raised $582.5 million and spent $481.2 million. The billion dollar game is afoot.

I can’t say I’m a fan of multi-million dollar fundraising and campaigns. In fact, I think it’s downright gross that so much is wasted, I mean spent, flooding all mediums, including lamp posts, front yards and car bumpers, with in your face, Orwellian sloganing (wasn’t GW’s proposed national slogan “Ignorance is Strength,”) and propagandizing, not to mention outright slandering and smearing (for the record, Obama is NOT a muslim and Hillary is NOT a lesbian -- and even if they were, that would hardly sway the liberal opinion).

Is no one else bothered that the only ones turning a profit in this otherwise decimated economy is the commercial and advertising industry?

I personally can think of a few better ways to spend a billion dollars. For one, I want to see more money spent on PAC retirement and healthcare funding so that all those underappreciated, overworked lobbyists, unlike those ungrateful VA patients, can feel secure in growing old. Or how about using some of that money conducting more research on the effect unemployment benefits and social services has on the poor in the hopes of one day finding a cure for disenfranchisement.

But I delude myself. Of course the costs of campaigns will keep going up. Buying one’s way into political office is as American as war, torture and foreclosures.