Over the summer, as he was working to scale back President Biden’s domestic agenda, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia traveled to an $18 million mansion in Dallas for a fund-raiser that attracted Republican and corporate donors who have cheered on his efforts.
In September, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who along with Mr. Manchin has been a major impediment to the White House’s efforts to pass its package of social and climate policy, stopped by the same home to raise money from a similar cast of donors for her campaign coffers.
Even as Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, both Democrats, have drawn fire from the left for their efforts to shrink and reshape Mr. Biden’s proposals, they have won growing financial support from conservative-leaning donors and business executives in a striking display of how party affiliation can prove secondary to special interests and ideological motivations when the stakes are high enough.
Ms. Sinema is winning more financial backing from Wall Street and constituencies on the right in large part for her opposition to raising personal and corporate income tax rates. Mr. Manchin has attracted new Republican-leaning donors as he has fought against much of his own party to scale back the size of Mr. Biden’s legislation and limit new social welfare components.
This month, the billionaire Wall Street investor Kenneth G. Langone, a longtime Republican megadonor who has not previously contributed to Mr. Manchin, effusively praised him for showing “guts and courage” and vowed to throw “one of the biggest fund-raisers I’ve ever had for him.”
John LaBombard, a spokesman for Ms. Sinema, rejected any suggestion that campaign cash factored into her approach to policymaking. She was a lead negotiator on the bipartisan infrastructure deal that Mr. Biden signed last week, and during her time in the Senate, she has positioned herself as an ideologically flexible centrist willing to buck her party in representing a purple state.
“Senator Sinema makes decisions based on one consideration: what’s best for Arizona,” Mr. LaBombard said.
Nelson Peltz, a billionaire investor who brought a Republican-heavy group of chief executives to have lunch with Mr. Manchin in Washington a few months ago, said the senator “understands that you can’t spend, spend, spend and feel there’s no recourse for it.”
Mr. Peltz, who donated to Mr. Manchin in 2017, has not given to Ms. Sinema, but he said that she had requested a meeting, which will take place in a few weeks.
Yet again, the fact that the business of business is business (profit), not concern for the public interest, makes itself clear. And, the fact that money looks out for itself, not the public interest, is also clear.
Questions:
1. Is it fair to see American politics as mostly a contest between political, economic, social and religious forces that fight for power and wealth concentrated at the top against opposing forces that fight for more distributed power and wealth?
2. Should all taxes and regulation be eliminated and everything privatized, as the radical right Republican Party and soulless business community want, while people who can't survive are ignored and allowed to just go away?
3. Is it credible for Sinema, Manchin or any other politician to argue that non-trivial amounts of special interest money has no impact on their policymaking, and instead, they only try to do what is best for their constituents? If all the special interest cash has no effect, then why donate it at all because it would be 100% wasted money with 0% return on investment[1]? Which came first, the chicken or the egg, i.e., campaign contribution first, policy stance first, or both affect each other right from the get go?
Footnote:
1. One site offered an online ROI (return on investment) calculator. Donated special interest money can be the main source of cash for a campaign to spend for an election or re-election. The site comments:
Assessing return on investment is a standard practice within businesses which are very similar to political campaigns in terms of challenges experienced. In political campaigns or in issue campaigns the end goal tends to be a simple win/lose but you can apply an ROI mindset to the running of your campaign by giving a monetary value to a measurable item, for example, votes pledged.
The little figures holding bags of cash
at the top are special interests tossing cash into
the hopper, but they expect nothing in return?
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