Last summer, I wrote about the leading candidate for Governor in the Michigan Republican primary being thrown off the ballot because more than half the signatures in his nominating petition were fraudulent. The out-of-state firm hired to gather the signatures just made many of them up.
It was a story, I said, “not of a crooked candidate, but of what happens too often when people with name recognition and celebrity status but no local political roots or organizational support decide to run for high office.”
Fast forward to George Santos, the new member of Congress from New York who fabricated a whole life story, fooled the media, fooled the voters, and won election last November. For the media, the story is the story of a consummate con artist. Once the veil was lifted they began to dig out all the various lies about family, ethnic heritage, education, job experience, and athletic prowess. It seems just about everything was made up.
It is an easy story to tell and took on the usual trappings of celebrity coverage. Lots of personal detail. Little of it meaningful. The headlines say it all.
How George Santos Made Baruch Volleyball Famous.
Inside George Santos’s District Office: Nothing to See Here.
George Santos Invited a Guest to the State of the Union. He Said Yes.
George Santos Married a Brazilian Woman. House Is Asked to Find Out Why.
Lost in the focus on Santos’s actions and his flaws, is the story of the changes in our political structures that made a Santos almost inevitable at some point. All it took was someone with sufficient moxie and creativity.
It was not that long ago that Tip O’Neill, the rumpled ward politician from Boston who rose to the pinnacle of power as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, titled his primer for aspiring politicians All Politics Is Local. What comes through clearly is that the game he knew and played so well was rooted in friendship, shared trust, personal connection, and neighborhood.
Today, when candidates are recruited by national political committees and national interest groups; when the money, resources, and messages that fuel campaigns come from those same sources, the local connection is broken. There is little need for the candidate to have roots in the community, be a known quantity, and have an established identity, as Santos demonstrated.
That was not the case when politics was local. A friend of mine told the story of when he was a young lawyer, he walked into the Party headquarters of his Chicago ward to volunteer. The ward boss wanted to know who sent him. “No one,” he replied. The response, “We don’t want no one, no one sent.” You had to be known in the neighborhood. Recommended by someone who was already recognized.
Political power lay with local party organizations made up of volunteers and patronage workers who delivered the vote, knocking on doors, carrying the party’s message and promoting its candidates in conversations on the front porches of the wards they lived in.
The local organization selected its own local candidates as well as those who represented the area in the state capital and Washington. Gubernatorial and presidential candidates came to the local organization asking for support. Power was local. It was connected to a particular place. It was an integral part of the community.
When I ran for the Illinois legislature the first time, the county Democratic precinct organization provided the workers. Donations came from friends, party activists, and groups and individuals long associated with the party. All the planning and activities were initiated and carried out locally. It never occurred to me that outside groups might spend money to elect or defeat me. There were no state or national committees or interest groups I needed to talk to.
By the last time I ran, some 20 years later, all that was changing. I was recruited by a state committee. The week after I filed for office, I was inundated with questionnaires from interest groups wanting to know how I would vote on their issues. Campaign dollars were largely controlled by out-of-district interests.
The change came about as television advertising replaced porch conversations as the dominant communication technology for influencing votes. Raising money to pay for the advertising became more important than recruiting volunteers. Politics was transformed from a labor intensive to a capital intensive activity.
Since money and electronic messages are tied to no particular place and both can be instantly moved, the new power structure based on collecting money and creating carefully crafted and targeted messages is centralized. Money is the driving force. Money that can be gathered anywhere, sent anywhere, spent anywhere, and transformed into messages crafted anywhere and delivered anywhere, to any audience.
Voting and the political office itself are still tied to place. The voter and the candidate still have to live within the same geographical boundaries, but the political power that used to be located within those same boundaries has now moved outside them. Candidates are selected by outsiders, and the messages that elect them are crafted and paid for by outsiders.
Local political party organizations are for the most part shadows of their former selves. They are no longer gatekeepers that nurtured and vetted candidates for public office. The other gatekeeper for the community, local media, is also crippled as advertising dollars have fled to the internet. The newspapers that have not closed have been sold to national chains. All have cut back on staff and reporting of local news. Community radio stations are almost non-existent.
George Santos is an extreme example of what is inevitable: candidates and office holders who are not rooted in the communities they represent. Santos’s complete fabrication of his life story is unusual. What is usual, and more problematical, is that those selected by outsiders to run are selected because they reflect the attitudes and values of those who sought them out and brought them to the dance. Not those of the community they represent.
The local, spatial community is important because our quality of life depends on the characteristics of the particular community in which we live. The local community is where competing values can be balanced. It is where the banker who wants to keep his tax incentive also wants a well- funded curriculum in the high school his daughter attends. It is where the CEO of Exxon joins his neighbors in a lawsuit against a fracking operation that would make the neighborhood a less enjoyable place to live.
When political decisions are made in the community, everyone has to live with the results of what they collectively decided. Both the benefits and costs are shared.
When decisions for the community are made at the center, the benefits tend to flow to those who have power at the center, while the costs fall on the community. Local control is lost. Politics is no longer something that we do, but something that is done to us.
In Wisconsin, the legislature in recent years has removed or reduced local government control over the siting of wind turbines, the creation of charter schools, the maintenance of rental property, soil erosion at construction sites, shoreline zoning, labor contracts, and residency requirements for their employees.
Can we begin to reassert local political power in a world in which politics, the economy and communication are ever more centralized? It will take concerted, intentional effort. We may have to adopt Sisyphus as our role model and keep pushing the rock up the hill. The commitment has to be for the long run. It can’t be a one-and-done deal.
The voters are ready for change. Polls say that 85 percent are fed up with our politics. The communication tools are available to make local organizing easier . A vision, personal effort, and a commitment to organize are all required.
We can’t turn back the clock. The power won’t all come back, If we are successful in bringing some of it back, it will be because residents decided to act in the neighborhoods where they live, one community at a time.
I read and found myself in agreement with much of this. Clearly DPW has abandonned any aspiration to creating sustaiinable local organizations to build power beyond modern campaigning. Everything is fundraising. County Parties are largely bypassed for "community captains" and online "mobilizing" that provides no feedback to local leaders. Even campaign strategy is set by big money -- why did all of the other US Senate candidates suddenly drop out beforehin the primary; why did party organizations have no part in selecting or endorsing a candidate?
But I don't think a return to Chicago style party politics and 'local control' is an answer. My own experience with that style of politics came more at the end of a police club. And much of the battle for local control in Chicago meant keeping neighborhoods segregated. Given the divisions and antagonisms currently in play it's easy to see a racist and xenophobic organization manipulted by controlling media and advertising as likely as a strong democratic party local organization. That appeal to localism echoes Maga denunciiations of "globalists" which often devolves down to George Soros and the Jews or some other "other".
I don't know what the answer is and maybe don't even get the question. My own nostalgia leads me to look for a party or organization based on a clear class stand rather than localism or simple fundraising.