Table of Contents
.jpg?table=block&id=3ed5280f-62fa-8048-b4df-d18cd85c7559&cache=v2)
Do not index
When my oldest grandchild was in kindergarten, I asked him to participate in an experiment. (Sugar cookies helped.) Plowing through the campaign mailers I’d received that week, I’d hand him one to scrutinize and ask, “Good candidate? Or bad?”
He had no trouble whatsoever making that assessment. Hazy background? Gray-skinned people? Lots of black? BAD! A pastel landscape in the background? A smiling candidate walking with picture-perfect children or talking with grandmas over coffee? GOOD!
TV ads were even easier. Soundtrack right out of “The Shining”? A narrator who sounds like Rod Serling observing the explosion of Uranus? Bad-bad-bad.
Only one ad stumped my grandson, and that’s because he was raised to believe that shooting a firearm at the TV would land him in time-out for the rest of his born days.
I think of that experiment every day now as I pull the latest trash out of my mailbox. Mailer after mailer vilifies some candidate who, regardless of party, is a fellow Montanan. And the money! Over $275 million was spent in the last election cycle on Montana’s U.S. Senate race alone. To put that in perspective, last year $164.4 million was the amount needed to feed over 80,000 Montanans through SNAP benefits — benefits that 31,000 Montanans will lose next week.
I never look at the mailers. That’s harder to do with the TV ads that continually interrupt golf tournaments (yay) and WNBA playoff games (grrrr). On your laptop these days, you can’t even play a round of solitaire without being besieged by attack ads.
Dark money funds the vast majority of these hit pieces. The reason is simple: Nobody wants to be identified as the purveyor of half-truths and cherry-picked mischaracterizations that “prove” a candidate’s worthlessness. So groups with lofty-sounding names completely belying their lowlife purpose scour the sewers for stink that might stick.
Is the shocking tale told in context? Is it representative of the candidate’s record as a whole? Is it even true? Not the concerns of the dark-money sewer rats — or the laws that “govern” them. Their only focus is pushing your buttons.
Anything to do with sex is apparently a sure-fire button-pusher. A motherly voice tells us this candidate failed to pursue the majority of sex crimes that surfaced when he was U.S. Attorney, while the screen depicts a half-undressed little girl cowering in fear, her eyes blocked out as though to protect her privacy (while the ad itself violates it).
Not to be outdone, another woman’s voice tells us the opposing candidate mistreated women in his workplace and mischaracterized a settlement that assigned no blame as “sweeping it” (whatever “it” is) “under the rug.”
And judging from the amount of play it gets, the “issue” of transgender athletes in women’s sports — already illegal in Montana and involving fewer than 10 of this nation’s 500,000 college athletes — is currently the most worrisome issue Montanans face. Affordable housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation? Adequately protected forests, streams, schools? Pfft. Let’s hate someone instead.
The money pouring into political campaigns is not just putrifying the election process. It’s putrifying US — reducing the information needed to choose our leaders to what a gossip column provides and the thinking required to that of a five-year-old high on sugar cookies.
It’s shielding candidates from messages that benefit them, but they don’t want to deliver — or blindsiding them entirely. Whatever you think of Alani Bankhead as a candidate, what dark money did for and then to her is just not right.
Most importantly, its influence deprives us of the very thing we vote for in the first place — representation. You dance with the one who brung ya … and in government office in America today, that ain’t the voters. It’s the donors. It’s time for us to cut in.
I-194, the Montana plan to eliminate dark money in our elections, cuts in. No, it doesn’t go as far as I’d like. Yes, it’s going to require some adjustments for advocacy groups I support. And, yes, if passed, it will be appealed and appealed again. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It’s way past time to take the first one.
Mary Sheehy Moe
Mary Sheehy Moe has served in the Montana senate and on the city commission and school board in Great Falls.
