Eliot Engel is a short man with dark thinning hair, a thick mustache, and wire-rimmed glasses. He has been the U.S. Representative in Congress for the 17th District of New York for 18 years, and in November 2006 he’s running for office again. From the minute congressmen get into office they begin raising money for their reelection campaign. As of December 31, 2005, Mr. Engel had raised a total of $297,000: $128,000 from businesses, $53,000 from unions, $90,000 from individuals and $25,000 from single issue contributions. This kind of money can get you some strong marketing power and brand recognition. He recently sent a glossy color brochure to many of the 185,000 voters in District 17 saying how upset he is about the high price gas; “Over $3 a gallon!”
Incumbent congressmen usually have a striking advantage; in 2004 only seven of the House of Representatives’ 435 members failed to win re-election. They have made it easier to win elections by redrawing the boundary lines of their districts to ensure that more registered voters of the same party fall within their district. Mr. Engel’s district was redrawn in 2003 to include southern Rockland county and some parts of northern Rockland (not too far north where it becomes too rural to be liberal), a strip of Westchester between Route 9 and the Hudson (earthy-crunchy), the northwest corner of the Bronx (Jewish), and half of Yonkers and all of Mt. Vernon (black). Mr. Engel won 76 percent of the vote the last time he ran in 2004. That kind of success approaches the percentages of the electorates won by Robert Mugabe and Sadaam Hussein.
Can an ordinary citizen run for U.S. Congress? Hypothetically, yes. Victor Alvarez, an environmentalist and resident of the Bronx with no political experience, decided to try. He refuses to accept any campaign contributions and has kept his campaign expenditures below $50. His big idea is to outfit all road surfaces with indestructible solar panels. When I asked Victor what he thought of Mr. Engel, he said, “He voted to go to war with Iraq. He’s a nice enough guy, but he’s a mediocre U.S. Representative at best, and yet the 17th District can’t seem to get rid of him.” Victor built a website, www.fixearthnow.com ($12 for the domain name, $23 for web hosting). He called the state board of elections and got their booklet called “Running for Elective Office in New York State.” He learned that to get on the ballot he had 30 days to get 1,250 signatures.
Victor printed a flyer from his home computer (his five-year-old son took his campaign photo), made a sign ($15), and tried to collect signatures by himself. He went to Nyack on the first weekend of the 30-day window and picked a street corner opposite a natural food market. The third person he asked to sign his petition wanted to know where he stood on gay marriage. Victor doesn’t consider gay marriage to be an important matter in comparison to such other issues as foreign policy, the economy, and the environment, but he had inadvertently chosen the day of Nyack’s gay pride festival to kick off his candidacy. Things were off to a bad start. “You’d better make up your mind because you’re not going to get any signatures if you’re not for it,” he was told. A little later the mayor of Nyack walked up and also asked Victor his stance on gay marriage. After hearing of his neutrality, the mayor refused to sign the petition and called Victor a “wussy.” After three hours on a crowded street corner, Victor was only able to gather 41 signatures. To keep his campaign alive, a new strategy was in order. He decamped to Olives, a nearby bar, where he persuaded the lead singer of a lesbian band to introduce him from the mike and urge patrons to sign his petition. This got him two more signatures, which works out to 43, or 14.3 per hour. To get the entire 1,250 it was going to take approximately 100 hours. Because Victor works a full-time job, he wasn’t willing to use up his vacation time on his attempt to get elected to Congress.
What he discovered is that it is nearly impossible for an ordinary citizen to get elected to Congress. Ordinary people lack extraordinary wealth and without it, there are no signature gatherers, PR professionals, consultants, and ad campaigns. Politicians who lack wealth have to excel in salesmanship because they spend much of their time begging for campaign contributions from the rich. Big spenders shop for compliant statesmen and expect big favors in return for campaign contributions. This is what the late Jane Jacobs was talking about when she mentioned “the art of negating the power of votes with the power of money.”
U.S. society runs on a blend of democracy and capitalism. There is a delicate balance between the two, but capitalism has made inroads into the democratic process and has undermined it. Significant campaign finance reform is essential to root out much of the corruption that currently exists in the government.
Exacerbating this is the problem of voter apathy. In 2004, national voter turnout in federal elections was 55 percent. In the mid-term elections of 2002, it was 37 percent. Many of the people that do make it out to the polls vote negligently by not properly researching the candidates, falling prey to campaign marketing, or basing their vote on purely selfish reasons.
When candidates are essentially in the business of peddling influence for cash, and voters just don’t care, some unsavory characters are able to get elected to Congress and remain there for a long time. Article 1, Section 2 at the very top of the US Constitution reads, “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States.” The founding fathers probably expected a little more turnover in the membership. They would certainly call for a separation of money and politics and the redrawing of congressional districts in a fair, objective manner. They might even have made it easier for Victor Alvarez, and others like him, to run for Congress, because that’s what they intended: a government to be run by the people, for the people.