Billionaire candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer are setting a dangerous example, writes EricLevitz
If money can’t buy you the presidency, Bloomberg’s fine with renting it. Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Robin Hood Tom Steyer has the résumé of a hedge-fund manager and the charisma of an accountant. His public speaking skills are minimal, political experience, negligible, and taste in ties, unforgivable. His natural constituency is ostensibly that subset of progressive Democrats who want their party’s nominee to be both a populist outsider and early investor in private prisons.
There’s nothing new about billionaires exercising outsize influence over American politics. But the scale of Steyer’s initial ad buys dwarfed that of any previous self-funding candidate. Now Bloomberg’s ad-spending has dwarfed Steyer’s. And yet, as a percentage of personal wealth, both men’s expenditures are negligible.
What makes Steyer and Bloomberg’s vanity campaigns concerning is their rationality. For men of their means , mounting a historically well-funded presidential campaign is a minor indulgence, akin to an upper middle-class family spending a weekend at a ski resort. Given the costs, the fact that two billionaires are spending record-setting amounts in pursuit of political power seems less remarkable than the fact that more members of their class aren’t.
But for each of the big-spending billionaires named above, there are scores of others who’ve yet to meaningfully enter the political fray. And even the Soroses and Koches of the world are shelling out only a small fraction of the amount they could afford to. As Jonathan Chait recently noted, total spending by both sides in the 2016 election barely exceeded $1 billion. That is less than 1 percent of Bezos’s net worth.
And, of course, media is just one tool at the politically-engaged plutocrat’s disposal. There are also lobbying outfits to fund, astroturf interest-groups to conjure, revolving doors to turn, and wine-cave dinners to arrange. And considering the Supreme Court’s wildly permissive definition of political bribery, even more direct means of acquiring a legislator’s sympathy are also viable.
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