“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession.  I’ve come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

That’s always been one of my favorite Ronald Reagan quotes.  It illustrates the true nature of politics.  It’s all about money, and what politicians are willing to do for it.

As cynical as this may sound, money plays a big part in winning elections.  Billboards, television ads, radio ads, flyers, pamphlets, yard signs, button,s t-shirts, consultants, pollsters, staffers, press conferences and rallies.  These are the tools politicians use to get themselves elected, and they cost a lot of money.  In fact, it’s not at all unusual to see a campaign spend millions of dollars to get a person elected to a job that pays just a few hundred thousand dollars a year.

The point here is that often the amount of money a candidate is able to spend on a campaign determines who the winner of an election is.  Not always, of course, but often.

If it didn’t we wouldn’t see hundreds of millions of dollars spent on campaigning during elections.

Here in North Dakota, though, politics aren’t as much of a “big money” enterprise as the rest of the country.  Most of our political leaders are “citizen politicians.” North Dakota is a small state, and our political arena is small as well.  Our politicians are regular people.  The state legislature is only in session every two years, and all of our legislators have a “day job” which pays the bills.

Our politicians are regular people, and our political scene has never been one that included a lot of money.  Until the last several years that is.

The men who make up North Dakota’s current congressional delegation in Washington D.C. are something of an anomaly in state politics.  All three of them – Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan and Earl Pomeroy – are career politicians.  They’ve never worked in the private sector.  They’ve never worked a job outside of the government.  They’re also an anomaly because they’ve brought “spend big” politics to North Dakota.  These men collect millions of dollar in contributions every year and aren’t afraid of spending those millions to keep themselves in office.

Now, you might ask yourself why the amount of money these men get in contributions is a bad thing.  Doesn’t it indicate a lot of support for their campaigns?  It does, but the problem is that the support it represents isn’t from North Dakotans.  According to OpenSecrets.org Kent Conrad got 93.9% of his contributions this election cycle from out of state.  Earl Pomeroy got 72.5% of his campaign contributions from out of state.  Byron Dorgan, even though he was not campaigning this year, got 92.2% of his money from out of state.

What those percentages translate into are millions of dollars in political money that is used to influence North Dakota elections.  And influence them they do.  In his campaign to be re-elected to the Senate Kent Conrad spent nearly $3,000,000, an amount that is approximately 30 times more than his opponent Dwight Grotberg raised in total, and that was still just barely over half of what Conrad had in the bank.  He (along with Pomeroy and Dorgan) poured a good chunk of the money left over into local campaigns, which in a lot of races meant the Demcorat candidate could spend twice as much as his/her opponent.  All thanks to out-of-state contributors.

I think this is something North Dakotans need to be worried about.  One thing our founding fathers were very concerned about was the idea that smaller, sparsely-populated states in the Union could be drowned out in our political system by the larger, more populated states.  They shaped our Congress, with each state getting equal representation in the Senate and Senators getting appointed by the state Governors as opposed to being elected by the people, with that very thought in mind (though with the passage of the 17th amendment Senators are now put into office through popular votes).  They also established the Electoral College with an eye toward ensuring that smaller states had a political voice in national elections proportional to the larger states.

But our founding fathers, in all their wisdom, did not foresee the problem we face today with contributions from “big money” political interests in other parts of the country essentially buying elections in “small money” political arenas like North Dakota.  Certainly North Dakotans still wield the power at the ballot box and can cast their vote for whoever they want, but how informed can the state’s voters be on the candidates when on side can drown out the other by spending exponentially more on the campaign?

So how do we solve the problem?  For one, we could limit political contributions to constituents only, essentially allowing politicians to only receive money from people who are actually qualified to vote for them.  Some people are concerned that this might be a violation of free speech rights.  While political contributions are absolutely a form of political speech, I don’t see where a limitation to constituent-only contributions is a breech of free speech rights.  Citizens could still express themselves with political contributions, just not to politicians who don’t represent them.  The Supreme Court has long upheld “time and place” regulations on free speech, and I don’t see why this regulation would be any different.

There may be some other solutions out there too, but regardless this money problem is something that needs to get fixed lest North Dakotans find themselves being governed by politicians chosen by out-of-state interests.  We need either a legal fix, or at the very least an in-state media establishment that is actually interested in exposing where the real backing for these politicians comes from.

This column also appears in the current issue of the Dakota Beacon, which you really should be subscribing to if you don’t already.