Last week as the Massachusetts Democrats gathered in convention the New York Times rolled out Inside the Audition for Democrats’ Next Crusading Attorney General projecting the race for the party’s nominee as a signal of where the national party is headed. Then the Times just went for the usual horse race stuff. Too bad because there is a national story here.
The story tries to juggle two concerns:
. . . its contours will tell us something about what voters on the left are most passionate about.
It is also exposing a fault line within the Democratic Party over corporate money — between those who see it as inherently corrupting and reject it, and those who view it as a necessary evil.
The story quotes seven sources: five party regulars, pollster David Paleologos, and former assistant attorney general and American Promise president Jeff Clements. On the “corporate money” angle Paleologos was quoted but only to give his opinion on the horse race. Clement accurately pointed out that Massachusetts has never seen such outlandish SuperPAC spending in an AG’s race and it raises serious ethical concerns.
That leaves the ‘what does the left feel most passionately about’ angle which is standard horse race stuff. Forget it. Who cares.
The “corporate money” angle has a directional fault—it’s not corporate money. It’s money from extraordinarily wealthy individuals like WalMart heir Jim Walton, Andrew Balson, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings who gave to the Better Boston Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee, which raised $2,000,000 in support of Campbell’s candidacy for mayor of Boston in 2021. (See A Better Boston for Oligarchs).
The Times missed the national significance by never asking: ‘Gee, I wonder why these wealthy folks from places like Arkansas, California, and Utah care about the Boston mayor’s race?’ Answer: they are spending to privatize public schools and saw Campbell as their best chance to influence Boston school politics.
Walton, Hastings et al. are long term investors. Every Massachusetts AG since Robert Quinn but for Jim Shannon (who lost a 1990 AG primary to Scott Harshbarger) has run for governor, and all of them except Quinn and Tom Reilly have gotten the nomination. In eight years Campbell would be the heir apparent to a Governor Healey. Money is patient. Money never sleeps.
Public education is under attack by a rogues gallery of oligarchs including the Waltons and Charles Koch. There are voucher school ballot questions in California (an ex-Trump official and Koch-connected former Democratic state senator). Betsy DeVos is underwriting a vouchers campaign in Michigan. New Hampshire has vouchers thanks to the Koch network. Koch funded Idaho Freedom Foundation longs to abandon public education altogether as a socialist conspiracy. Dark money operations associated with Koch and the far right Council for National Policy are wreaking havoc with public education in Virginia. Charter schools industry front Democrats for Education is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in mayor’s and council races in Washington, DC. DFER is mostly funded by the Waltons with occasional infusions from famous Democrats Betsy DeVos (through her American Federation for Children) and Rupert Murdoch (at least $1,000,000). DFER Massachusetts has ready access to the pages of The Boston Globe.
Horse race stories are candy corn and money stories reach the expiring heart of democracy. Horse race journalism entails some polls and gathering quotes from a few professionals who give quotes for a living. The public likes them and political insiders love them. Money stories require long hours trying to track money rich people pay smart people to hide and seeking comments from people who won’t talk to you. They’re hard to write and hard for the public to absorb. So we get horse race stories.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Louis Brandeis
[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is now in print.]
