BY MARK SHIELDS

Mark A. Hanna was a wealthy Cleveland businessman who shrewdly laid out the winning strategy and personally, out of pocket, paid all the costs required to secure the 1896 Republican presidential nomination for his fellow Ohioan William McKinley. Sometime after McKinley’s election and re-election to the White House, Hanna, based upon his personal experience, offered this timeless insight: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.”
The New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum has become the latest in a growing number of scholars to argue that political money is not that influential in deciding the winners of congressional elections or even in affecting how the winners, once in office, will vote on policy. We should, Appelbaum writes, be less anxious about cash in campaigns because “over the past year, Americans spent more on almonds than on selecting their representatives in Congress.”
To borrow the immortal phrase of Hollywood’s Sam Goldwyn, “gentlemen, include me out.” Forget the wealthy campaign donors, who — please take my word for it — almost always write their checks not out of altruism but fully expecting a “return” on their “investment.” Instead, think about the typical House candidate, who — just to cover the costs of her campaign — has to raise an average of $18,000 a week, 52 weeks a year, every year. Beyond raising that war chest, if a congressman hopes to rise to a position of leadership within the House or to win appointment to a powerful House committee, then he has to raise money for his party’s campaign committee.
This means going to a cramped cubicle at party headquarters and, several days a week, turning into a telemarketer, calling a list of people, most of whom you don’t know, and begging for money. Because you are provided the information on a sheet, you know what the potential check writer’s legislative and policy priorities are. You emphasize how your voting record is in harmony with the potential contributor’s values, and you are careful to avoid any potential areas of disagreement.
Because the member of Congress does this for hours on end every week, it means that the member is not spending his time meeting with and listening to his constituents or mastering a subject or getting to know personally his congressional colleagues and potentially collaborating on the public’s business.
Beyond all that fundraising lies more fundraising. Why? Because of the legitimate fear that a misnamed “independent” committee, underwritten by anonymous big money, could spend millions against any at-risk incumbent, baselessly defaming and possibly destroying him politically for being sympathetic to child pornographers or worse. The one insurance policy many members of Congress believe they have against that career-threatening “nuclear option” is to stockpile millions in their personal campaign accounts — which means more hours putting the arm on everyone who lobbies you on any issue from school lunches to bridge repairs.
The casualties of the endless cycle of fundraising are, too often, the independence, integrity and ideals of those who become its prisoners, and sadly, there’s an even greater loss of public trust and confidence in our own self-government.
To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2014 MARK SHIELDS
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BY L. BRENT BOZELL AND TIM GRAHAM

The media have developed a predictable and equally annoying habit every presidential election cycle. We hear the Republicans are going to be crushed by pandering too much to conservatives. The Democrats are firmly moderate and need a push from the left so they don’t forget their “compassion.”
So it was with Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter 35 years ago. So will it be in 2016, no matter who is nominated.
Republican primary voters have nominated moderates in every election cycle since Reagan ’88, but not because they are moderates. Instead, the moderates survive the usual conservative circular firing squad exercise; or, as was the case with both father and son Bush, the moderates ran as conservatives. How did the moderates who ran as moderates fare? Ask Presidents Dole, McCain and Romney.
And yet those same tired voices in the press soldier on, still claiming ridiculously that a moderate Republican is the solution to the GOP’s woes.
The media elites who have no concept of the GOP’s base will not stop insisting conservatives should be ignored. Predictably, both sides of the pundit table at the “PBS NewsHour” on Feb. 27 identified the annual Conservative Political Action Conference as the place where Republican candidates and ideas go to die.
Liberal analyst Mark Shields said conservatives have an “unelectable message,” which is pretty much what he’s been saying for the past half a century, no matter how many times conservatives win, including the last two midterms. Faux-conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks expressed horror. “There’s conservatives, and then there’s conservatives, and then conservatives, and then way over on the other side of the room is CPAC … this is like the hardest of the hardcore.”
On ABC’s “This Week” on March 1, NPR’s Cokie Roberts insisted, “I think the person that won at CPAC was John Kasich. He didn’t show up, and I think that’s the wisest thing for anybody to do.” Minutes later, the former Republican pollster Matthew Dowd ridiculously claimed Reagan would be booed today at CPAC.
Earth to Dowd: It is pollsters like you who would never, ever have found a job on a Reagan campaign.
Back in January on “This Week,” Roberts argued, “Republicans should stay out of Iowa altogether. What happens to them is that they get pushed so far to the right in those venues that it gives them a terrible time in the general election.”
What about the Democrats?
On Feb. 22, “This Week” celebrated “Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as unabashedly progressive as Ben & Jerry’s. … Sanders rails against the corrupting influence of money in politics. He stands for economic justice. … He’s not just for raising the minimum wage, he wants to double it.”
ABC reporter David Wright acknowledged Sanders calls himself a socialist, and suggested he might be Don Quixote tilting at the Clintons’ windmill. Then ABC found a voter who said, “Hey, more power to him. He’s going to get that windmill straightened up for sure.”
Every summer, the radical left has a “Netroots Nation” conference, but you won’t find the media elites lining up to proclaim that the leftist attendees are too extreme and potentially damaging to the Democrats. The radicals at the Daily Kos started a “Yearly Kos” convention in 2006, then renamed it “Netroots Nation” in 2008. Their 2007 conference attracted seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates.
Last July, Vice President Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren each spoke to the gathering in Detroit, but no one on the networks found that dangerous, or even interesting. Put “Netroots Nation” into the Nexis database, and you get nothing ever on ABC or CBS, a brief CBS mention in 2013, and a brief PBS mention in 2010.
So let’s review: “Ultraconservatives” are perennially ruinous to Republican political victories, but there’s no such thing as ultraliberals in the Democratic Party. Every candidate to the right of Jeb Bush is doomed in a general election, and if he should win the nomination, he’ll be inevitably dismissed as going “too far to the right” to be electable.
The best advice for GOP candidates: Listen carefully to these journalists. Then do the opposite.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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