The Outstater
A $100,000 Audience with the Guv
“That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.” — Thomas Jefferson
FINANCING POLITICS should be a simple matter, or so we argue in “Indiana Mandate: A Return to Founding Principles”: Just ensure that anyone funding a political effort use his own name and money or face certain prosecution.
Some distance from that ideal is a “policy summit” next week to raise what the Capital Chronicle has hinted is “dark” money for a nonprofit supporting Gov. Mike Braun’s agenda.
The price to attend the day-long event in an Indianapolis luxury hotel ranges from $2,500 for one session and lunch with the governor to $100,000 for a personal audience as a “headline partner.” Money is nothing but fungible so nobody will tell us precisely from where the nonprofit war chest is coming. Let us just say that Governor Braun will certainly be told who gave what from where.
(May we suggest that an alternative would be the dozens of independent, fact-based scholars, economists and other Indiana experts, all politically unconcerned, available to advise the governor on any of 75 issues our foundation has identified — for the cost of a phone call.)
None of this is new, as we also note in “Indiana Mandate.” George Washington was chastised for buying $195 worth of punch and hard cider for friends prior to an election for the Virginia House of Burgesses.
And we would be surprised to learn that any of this is illegal or even improper by Indianapolis standards. Indeed, the event seems designed by a perfectly honest lawyer and his lobbyist brother-in-law. Our objection is the message it sends to the Hoosier polity, that is, if you can’t write a big check then your problems are secondary.
“All citizens should see themselves as members of the body politic and be encouraged to write to elected officials, attend public meetings, speak out at these meetings and run for office,” we said in “Indiana Mandate.” And as Thomas Jefferson wrote to Edward Tiffin in 1801, “That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.”
Events such as the Braun fundraiser, though, leave citizens estranged from an elite, out-of-touch political class. They perceive that they have limited ability to influence policies and that there is a small cadre of people who make up the “establishment.”
It is therefore difficult to dismiss an email being distributed this week by Indiana Democrats: “Twenty-one years of one-party rule in Indiana has made the Republicans so corrupt that they’ll sell you out to the highest bidder without even trying to hide it.”
Nationally, we are told that 28 percent of Americans think a sizable minority of elected officials break the law or abuse the powers of their office; 12 percent think almost all elected officials abuse the powers of their office.
Those are the numbers you would expect in a monarchy or other authoritarian outfit, not a constitutional republic. And when ordinary citizens are asked why they don’t run for political office they cite the burden of constant fundraising, lack of privacy for their families, a sense that politics is no longer the best way to effect change and cynicism about government and its ever-growing size.
So, is there a good reason that a governor needs to charge for his attention? Doesn’t that come with the job?— tcl
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