Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [130]
Well, as Bush himself once said, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”
Shame on him. Shame on us.
17.
What Is to Be Done?
No fair, we think, to sit around taking potshots at the people trying to govern the joint, unless you can present better ideas. It’s one thing to point out that the great majority of Americans under Bush are not doing well—are in fact losing by every economic and quality-of-life measurement known to man—and that this country no longer works for the benefit of most of the people in it—but it’s another to come up with a better plan.
We do have some ideas—plenty of them, in fact—we think are solid, sensible, and worthy of consideration. We concentrate on two areas because they are the essentials without which nothing else can proceed—political reform and economic reform.
If there were one thing we could change about this country by the wave of a wand, it would be to end the legalized bribery that has rotted the democratic political system. We know we don’t have to sell you on this one. Never met an American yet who is not perfectly well aware that the political system is stacked in favor of those with money. You can’t amaze an American with that news—they know politicians get bought. “Our” elected officials answer to “them,” the ones who give big campaign contributions, not to “us” the people. Bullshit us no bullshit about how money “only buys access,” it doesn’t buy votes. It buys votes. Time after time after time after time. This is open corruption. It reeks, it is rot, and it is rampant. It is killing this country.
There is a cure. It’s called public campaign financing. Right away the conservatives fire back, “That’s socialism for politicians!” (thus cleverly marrying two things Americans hate—socialism and politicians). We’ve actually had public campaign financing in America for over thirty years, and it worked damned well for most of them. The major reform after the 1972 Watergate scandal—when millions of dollars in cash went sloshing around the country in briefcases to get dumped into Richard Nixon’s CREEPy Committee to Reelect the President campaign—was a form of public campaign financing. Every year, when you get to the bottom of your IRS 1040, there are two little boxes at the end before you sign the thing. One says, “Check here if you want to kick in a couple of your tax dollars to keep the presidential campaign honest,” and the other one says: “Check here if you don’t give a shit.”
Actually, the boxes don’t say that, but they should. And it worked, for at least three cycles, 1974 to 1986, then the Supreme Court gummed it up. In 1988 the Court made an absurd decision in a case called Buckley v. Valeo. The Court held that money is the same thing as free speech. Actually, money is the green stuff you use to buy things with; free speech is what comes out of your mouth, hopefully after some thought. Money ain’t free speech, and someday the Supremes will get around to reconsidering that one. In the meantime, the wall, the dam that had been built against special-interest money in presidential elections, commenced to leak something fierce. In 1988 the money was spurting through a couple of cracks in the dam; by 1992 it was gushing through huge holes; by 1996 it was pouring over the top of the dam like Niagara; and by 2000, the dam was gone. (In 2000 George W. Bush was able to raise such vast sums from corporate America that he turned down the public money available for his campaign so he wouldn’t have to observe the limits on spending that come with the public money.) Now, you could take this as a discouraging word, a sign that no matter how we try to fix the money in politics, the bastards will always find a way around it. Not us. We believe in Perpetual Reform.
We’re not sure you can arrange any human