Money may not buy love but it can buy a slot in the Democratic debate. Politico reports:
Tom Steyer’s campaign says he has qualified for the December Democratic presidential primary debate, making the billionaire activist the sixth active candidate to do so.
To qualify, candidates need to hit either 4 percent in four polls approved by the Democratic National Committee or 6 percent in two polls in early nominating states and get contributions from 200,000 donors. Steyer’s campaign announced that he crossed the 200,000 donor threshold on Tuesday; he had already achieved the requisite number of qualifying polls.
Steyer joins five other candidates who have qualified for the debate: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Candidates have until Dec. 12 to qualify for the debate, which will be hosted by POLITICO and PBS NewsHour.
While the Democrat candidates drone on about the evils of Citizens United, they spend little time to no time discussing Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court decision that made the candidacies of Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg and even Donald Trump possible. The decision essentially equated money with free speech and held that candidates can give unlimited amounts of money to their own campaigns. If money is speech then the poor man has no speech. It means that billionaires have a whole lotta speech. As a matter of fact, Steyer has so much speech that he could pour millions of dollars in advertising and outreach and get his polls numbers to where he needed to qualify for the debate. And let’s face it, at this stage, polls essentially measure name ID and the number of ads voters have seen on TV or social media. I don’t mean to be unkind but it certainly wasn’t Steyer’s charisma or stale talking points that got him on the debate stage.
In the meantime, Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang are struggling to qualify for the next debate. From the same article:
Two other candidates are on the precipice of qualifying for the December debate: Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang. Yang and Gabbard each need one more poll to qualify for the debate, as both say they have crossed the donor threshold.
After Gabbard and Yang, no other candidate is close to qualifying for the next debate.
Gabbard and Yang are the only two candidates I can bring myself to vote for – the rest, I might as well stay home. As far as Yang, he has qualified for all the debates thus far, but has not shined despite being a member of the U.S. national debate team in the 1990s. If he doesn’t make the December debate, I doubt anyone will notice. He has only managed to get a handful of minutes at each debate. The last time, Yang spoke for about six minutes and about half that time was opening and closing statements. He made more news spraying whipped cream in the mouth of his kneeling supporters.
Tulsi, on the other hand, has made the most of the few minutes the debate moderators allotted her. She used her time, wisely, to take out opponents. Her first victim was Tim Ryan but her top scalp was Kamala Harris. In the last debate, she attacked Buttigieg. It was a solid hit but not fatal since Mayor Pete is a slippery fellow. In any case, at least Tulsi has been able to generate soundbites and viral clips from her debate appearances.
Neither Tulsi nor Yang got into the race believing they could win the Democratic nomination. Both are using their campaigns to highlight issues they care about. Yang wanted to bring attention to the effects of automation and propose Universal Basic Income as a solution and, to certain extent, he has been successful. I doubt there would have been ANY questions about automation if Yang had not made the debate stage.
Gabbard’s motivation for entering the fray is to change our current foreign policy – an herculean task. If I am correct and Tulsi’s sole purpose for running for president is to challenge the foreign policy establishment then she should have run for the Republican nomination. I realize that on many issues, especially social issues, she is on the progressive end of the spectrum. However, I believe she adopted many positions simply because she’s running as a Democrat. She originally opposed same sex marriage and is an Hindu – not exactly a socially progressive religion. Besides, Trump has marginalized social issues in the GOP.
Had Tulsi run as a Republican, she would be in double digits instead of languishing in the low single digits. She would have surely won the hearts and support the Ron Paul faction in the GOP because she is solid when it comes to the issues they care about: ending wars, legalize drugs and civil liberties. If Tulsi had run as a Republican, MSNBC would be praising her instead of smearing her as a Russian asset as a way to attack Trump. She would not win the GOP nomination but she certainly would garner more attention to her cause than running as a Democrat.
Can Steyer outright buy the Democratic nomination? I doubt it. But it doesn’t matter. Thanks to Buckley vs. Valeo, Steyer and his fellow billionaires, if they don’t manage to buy the nomination, they can always purchase the nominee.
UPDATE: Andrew Yang makes the December debate. How many minutes will he get? Any bets?
