History was not made by the high level of debate, nor by any prescience of the voters' decisions, in the recent American elections but records were broken by the amount of money laid out in the candidates' campaigns.
Something like £150 million was spent in this massive effort to persuade the American workers, against what should have been their better judgment, that capitalism would be good for them under Republicans or Democrats. Some staggering sums were afforded by the candidates themselves.
A Democrat in Minnesota spent a total of $8 million, half of which he paid himself. In Texas a Republican spent $12 million — and was not elected. But most spectacular of all. in the battle for Governor of New' York State, Republican Lewis Lehrman’s election expenses came to $15 million, half of it from his own pocket.
Lehrman was another loser, at least in the election. In other ways he is a winner; "I will." he announced, "go out to work and make the money back." He was only fooling because his millions came not from his own work but from that of his employees, whose exploitation yielded the profits which enabled Lehrman to make his flamboyant bid for power in New York.
Expensive election campaigns, which imply that only the rich can mount an effective contest, make a lot of people fear for democracy. Such anxieties miss the point, which is essentially in the fact that millions of New Yorkers voted for the big spending Lehrman and millions more for Cuomo, the Democrat victor, who also spent millions of dollars in the election.
Workers who are enlightened about capitalism, who are aware of the impotence of its politicians to run the system in the interests of the people, are unimpressed by gaudy, costly electoral stunts. Such workers are. in the end, the only certain guardians of democracy.
The fact that at present working class voters are so misled as to support candidates like Lehrman and Cuomo is not a measure of how much money was spent in their campaigns but of the low level of workers' consciousness.
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This Running Commentary snippet was unsigned but it was published in the December Standard just before E. C. Edge's Running Commentary piece on the American Football strike, so there's a strong chance he wrote both pieces. (Especially as both relate to matters stateside.)
In the recent US Presidential Election, Kamala Harris's campaign spent over one billion dollars . . . only to lose to Donald Trump.
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