As Rob Granatstein of the Toronto Sun reports:
“The encouraging news out of City Hall is the GOM (Group Opposing Miller) have come to the real world conclusion only one person can run against Mayor David Miller in the 2010 election. Then it gets interesting. How do you decide who has the best shot at knocking off the boss? The answer the GOM is working on may shock you -- a leadership convention.”
About time, I (and doubtlessly many others who are fed up with the incompetent left-wing ideologue David Miller) say. Unfortunately, GOM has run into a wee hitch – campaign finance laws:
“There are huge issues to resolve. How do you pay for it [the convention] when candidates can't spend any money on their campaigns until Jan. 1, 2010, and this would all have to happen in the fall of 2009 at the latest”
People think that campaign finance restrictions are generally a Good Thing, so much so that it has become a motherhood issue in politics. Who would be against them?
However, the problems facing GOM illustrate one of the negative consequences of campaign finance laws – they protect incumbents in particular and the establishment in general from outside challenges. In other words, campaign finance laws prop up the status quo.
People think that by limiting political contributions they are limiting the ability of a few individuals or corporations with a lot of money to have inordinate influence over a politician. And they are right. Campaign finance restrictions favour candidates and parties who are able to muster a large number of small donations over opponents who have to rely on a small number of large donations.
But these same people never stop to think, who is better able to get a large number of people to donate money to them? Answer: the establishment candidate. The dark horse, the new guy, the marginalized, they don’t have a chance in this contest. Even though the establishment is hurt by being cut off from large donations, because politics is a zero-sum game, the establishment gains if the alternative choice loses even more.
The fact of the matter is, if you are coming up from nowhere, you can’t afford to play by the usual rules (which campaign finance laws codify). You need to innovate, which you can’t because now it’s illegal.
The feverish mind of the conspiratorial left imagines that only evil right-wing reactionaries benefit from no campaign restrictions – scoring huge bags of money from equally evil multinational corporations. The facts however paint a more balanced picture. In 1968, left-wing Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy ran for the Democrat nomination on an anti-war ticket against President Johnson (the establishment candidate, thanks to being the sitting President). Though McCarthy did eventually lose, his early success spooked Johnson enough that he quit the race. His run was made possible because of a handful of large donations from a few sympathetic rich liberals. If he tried that today, the post-Watergate finance laws would throw him into jail.
Fortunately, David Miller is now so unpopular that GOM may
be able to rise above artificial campaign finance impediments. But the fact
must be faced; campaign finance restrictions do help secure the establishment.
Is there not a way to circumvent campaign finance laws for things like this? Hell, the whole convention could be done on the internet, for nothing!
Why is it that liberals always manage to get around these things?
Posted by: WiseGuy | November 13, 2008 at 09:53 PM
David Miller's supporter--and donor--Wendy Cukier (Coalition For Gun Control) is currently under investigation by the RCMP, for matters relating to grant money from the Federal Government, during the Liberal reign.
David Miller's deflection of blame for gun crime from the Jamaican criminal element (Jane & Finch), onto people like elderly, Canadian gun owners may not be entirely a question of political correctness. Miller's campaign financing and possible links (financial, voting considerations) to organized crime, specifically in the Jamaican-Canadian community, should be investigated.
Torontonians, Ontarians and Canadians in general should not delude themselves about the 'root causes' of gun and gang crime. The huge influx of largely unscreened immigrants (CSIS estimates that only 10% of newcomers are given background checks) is the cause. This has nothing to do with labour shortages, or actuarial needs for keeping the pension system solvent; the large-scale warm body imports merely support the homebuilders' and developers' lobbies. (Jane & Finch was once a farm.) 'Green' activists should also protest what is the single, preventable cause of urban sprawl, and loss of greenland and farmland--mass immigration. In the UK, there are finally plans to impose hard caps on immigration and population, something we need here.
As for firearms, even if every legal gun source in Canada (and the U.S.) were shut down, guns would still get in, en mass, from Asia, via our crime-controlled ports. Firearms and ammunition can also be manufactured here, as is being done in Waziristan by illiterate, unskilled labour. This point is apparently lost on the effete urban elite...people like Stephan Dion, who brags about being unable to change a lightbulb.
Adam
Posted by: Adam C. Sieracki | December 27, 2008 at 01:21 AM