The Bargain of Democracy
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The prospect that Americans will spend $5 billion in the current presidential and congressional election cycle has sent our friends at the New York Times into a lather, we see by an editorial in the paper on Sunday. The billions in projected spending may correspond to a scant $17 for every American, or about $8.50 a year, less than a movie and about the same as two venti peppermint mochas at Starbucks. But the Times reckons it’s “shocking” even to political professionals.
Nevermind that for this, Americans get democracy. At $5 billion, democracy is a bargain. The New York Times may think it knows better than the American public how they should spend their money. The Mandarins on 8th Avenue may have concluded that Americans spend too much on political campaigns. The Times’s remedy, however, turns out to be the fix that it usually recommends for what it believes ails America: more Washington bureaucratic intervention.
Where is the perspective? The fact is that campaigns are cheap. We spend more than $10 billion on newspapers, four times as much as campaigns. Advertisers spend more than $46 billion on print advertisements in newspapers and a few billion more for online advertising, 20 times that of campaigns. To the New York Times, which happens to be in the newspaper business, these multiples are not large enough.
Yet the Times appears to be concerned that more than $1 billion will be spent by the two presidential nominees alone. But even a presidential campaign that spends several hundred million dollars would not be a major national advertiser. Dozens of companies each spend billions of dollars advertising annually. According to Advertising Age, advertising expenditures of $1.2 billion in 2005, let alone a few hundred million dollars, would not have landed an advertiser in the top 25.
Procter and Gamble spent some $3.9 billion on advertising in America in 2005 and nearly $8 billion worldwide. No one suggests that Washington should intercede to regulate the advertising habits of Procter and Gamble or hundreds of other commercial advertisers, just political candidates. Americans have personal consumption of nearly $9.8 trillion annually, or nearly $20 trillion in a two-year political cycle. To spend $2.5 billion on political campaigns is much less than 3 one hundredths of one percent of total expenditures. We spend far more on potato chips.
Senator Obama endorses a bill to shore up the now largely ignored provisions for federal financing of presidential campaigns. He and his allies try to portray federal campaign finance regulation as the protector of the little guy when it is the opposite. Campaign finance laws make it difficult for new candidates with new ideas to enter the political arena. These laws limit how much a candidate can receive from a single donor and force them to spend much of their precious resources on campaign finance lawyers, accountants, and auditors.
The wonder of this campaign season is not how much political campaigns spend but rather how little they spend and how much of those expenditures are absorbed by the professional campaign apparatus. Serious campaign finance reform would move in the opposite direction. It would eliminate campaign donation limits. It would let many of the campaign professionals find more productive pursuits. It would give political candidates the same rights to free speech enjoyed by Procter and Gamble, the New York Times, and ordinary Americans.