10 / 30
10
Oregon Truck DISPATCH
www.ORtrucking.orgGOVERNMENT AFFAIRS
A former state Senator once told me that money
is the mother’s milk of politics.
The cost of political
campaigns has certainly increased over the years.
It used to be that $200,000 would get you elected to
the House and around $300,000 would be enough for
a Senate seat. Those days, however, are long gone—
particularly in competitive races. A few years ago,
a candidate for the House spent over $1.2 million
to get elected. A favorite Senator of ours spent close
to $1 million on his last race and lost.
Yes, this is a substantial amount of money. As with any
promotional campaign, it takes a variety of messages
and methods to capture the attention of buyers—or in
this case, voters—all of which cost money! The real
beneficiaries are the campaign consultants, pollsters,
media buyers, printers and TV and radio stations.
As citizens, we have all grown to hate the campaign
season when we are bombarded by unwanted political
mail and TV and radio ads. In our world of instant
information, brief tweets and soundbites, it’s hard to
convey any message of substance. We say that we
particularly despise the negative advertising; however,
it is clear from the polls and election results that we
respond to all of it! The more and the nastier the better,
which has led to an all out arms race in terms of
raising campaign cash.
Certainly, part of the problem has been caused by the
ability of the public employee unions to raise huge
amounts of cash through automatic payroll deductions
from their members. Their agenda invariably revolves
around increasing taxes so that the government can
hire more good union members and pay them even
more than they do today. In order to be competitive,
other interests, such as ours, are forced to try to match
the unions, but we don’t have a captive audience to
draw from. This makes funding trucking and business-
friendly efforts and supporting sympathetic candidates
even more of a challenge. With their automatic PAC
deductions, the public employee unions have become
the kings of political cash.
Union money has created another phenomenon: the
ability to easily qualify ballot measures. For example,
as you know, it was public employee union backing
that brought us measures 66 and 67, which were clearly
detrimental to Oregon businesses. For the 2016 ballot,
By Bob Russell, OTA Government Affairs
The High Cost
of Politics