I agree with Duncan; presidential campaigns don't really cost that much money. The problem is that individuals are very poor at scaling up their own needs to that of much larger enterprises. So to Ezra Klein, $300 million dollars is an astonishing sum. I could buy 600 sweet houses, or 5,000 luxury cars, or take a cab for the rest of my life (my fondest wish...). It is, on the scale of a single person, an unimaginable accumulation of cash.
But national campaigns are not on the scale of Ezra Klein. Ezra Klein doesn't have to buy television advertising in every media market simultaneously, or fly dozens of people across the country multiple times a day, or blanket the country in bumper stickers, or employ hundreds of campaign staffers, or do much else. And so a sum that seems really large when your greatest daily expense is lunch isn't quite so impressive when you're competing in the New York media market. But the campaign sums, when compared to other large scale enterprises, are really not that much. For instance, Monster.com, an online job search web site, spends well over a $100 million a year on advertising alone. Coke, which has near universal name recognition and has to neither introduce their product nor explain its position on health care, spends over $2.4 billion.
So I'm down with $300 million to introduce a candidate for leader of the free world, explain their policy positions, employ their staff, finance their travel, and all the rest. Given the scale -- and the stakes -- of the enterprise, it's really not that much money. Indeed, the problem with campaign spending isn't in the outputs, it's the inputs. Coke finances its advertising budget by selling its soft drink. Too often, politicians finance their campaigns by auctioning off their policy positions. To make money you have to sell something, and the only product a candidate has is his or her potential office. And we don't want them selling that. So if a million small sum donors want to offer $300 bucks to the aspirants who inspire them, that's fine with me. But if a few pioneers and rangers and executives want to concentrate their spending for maximum influence, that's more worrying. And given that that's the quickest route to financial competitiveness, the system itself is sick. But not because it spends too much. It's because it sells too much.
