Taxpayer Advocate and former Long Beach RDA Board Member Terry Jensen recently published an Op Ed piece at LBReport.com entitled: “We Live Here; They Don’t ($)” concerning the current status of Mayor Foster’s campaign contributions. I encourage my readers to review the editorial here.
Mr. Jensen sums up the crux of what concerns him in this way: “Almost 80% of the donations listed in (Mayor Foster’s) disclosure form come from businesses and residents that reside outside of Long Beach and/or the state.”
The most current official list of Mayor Foster’s campaign contributions can be reviewed here.
I have immense respect for Mr. Jensen, his ongoing advocacy and his considerable service to our community. But I think he errs when he places undue emphasis upon any candidate’s campaign funds and whence they come.
Campaign funds purchase ad space, mailers and airtime it’s true. They fund dinners and parties and flyers distributed door-to-door. But none of those things, or any of the money that pays for them, can prevent a truly responsible voter (especially in this day and age) from acquiring pertinent facts about a candidate, thinking critically about those facts and then voting according to what they have learned and according to a candidate’s actual record, rather than that candidate’s campaign-funded rhetoric.
This most excellent website, among others, is clear proof of this truth. No amount of campaign funding is going to prevent people like Mr. ZumMallen, Mr. Wielenga, Mr. Douglas, Mr. Eakins, Mr. Pearl, Mr. Jensen, Ms. Ryan, or many others we all could easily name, from uncovering the facts about any candidate and reporting those facts to others.
Likewise, none of the things campaign funds can purchase have the ability to negate factual information about a person’s ability or inability to govern. Campaign funds can certainly be spent in attempts to obscure, to spin or to conceal such factual information, but it remains the responsibility of the electorate… and no one else… to be intelligent and discerning enough to see through such tactics and consider the facts at hand.
Nor is all information provided by a political campaign necessarily inaccurate or possessed of ulterior motive. Information about the productive accomplishments of a candidate is very important to consider. Political campaigns are often the most complete source for such information. But such information must always be weighed against all other facts readily available from other sources.
Information about campaign donations and their origins is instructive, certainly, especially insofar as it tells us what persons or entities have a vested interest in seeing a given candidate elected, but I believe such information has far less probative value than does an incumbent candidate’s actual performance in office. What others say, whether through their donated campaign funds or in their own words, about an incumbent candidate should carry far less significance for the electorate than what the candidate says and does, what he doesn’t say or do and how these things are said and done during his tenure.
During his or her preceding term, an incumbent candidate creates a very visible body of work; a public policy curriculum vitae, if you will, that is readily accessed and reviewed and easily considered. It is, at the end of the day, the electorate’s responsibility, and no one else’s, to gain access to, to understand and to give such factual information due and critical consideration, and then to vote accordingly.
Mayor Foster could amass a current campaign war chest worth millions, even billions of dollars, all of it donated by persons and entities outside of Long Beach. But the facts of his current administration remain the same. The facts of the decisions he has made and has not made remain available for public review and scrutiny. The facts of the manner in which the city has been led during his current term remain self-evident and readily evaluated.
What Mayor Foster says and how he says it on every public policy issue facing this city can be readily reviewed at any time by simply Google-searching his name and reading virtually every quote he has ever uttered in public. Which public policies he supports and which he does not are easily discerned from his many interviews, speeches and appearances. Go to any news and opinion website and enter his name in their search windows, hundreds if not thousands of pieces of factual information are delivered to our computer monitors to review at our leisure. Care to know how he conducts the City’s business? Visit the City Clerk’s Meeting Archives web page here and review, in writing and even by video, every single City Council or other public meeting he has presided over.
There are quite literally millions of pieces of factual information about Mayor Foster readily available to each of us if we but assume our personal responsibility as citizens to acquire them. No campaign-funding can erase or negate these facts. No “outside influences” can obfuscate or misrepresent them if we are truly considering them critically.
I believe that the will of the people concerning the qualifications and effectiveness of any incumbent elected official is best expressed at the ballot box, by a majority of the electorate.
If the majority of the electorate in Long Beach is truly displeased with Mayor Foster’s performance to the degree that they feel he should not be extended the honor of serving another term, and if that majority fulfills its constitutional responsibility and expresses their displeasure at the ballot box, it really won’t matter who donates to his campaign, where they’re from or how much they give.
In our Constitutional Republic, the ultimate power and responsibility in government is reserved to the people, as represented by a majority of the electorate. This power and responsibility is not theoretical or ethereal. It’s not merely “the way it’s supposed to be.” This power and responsibility is real, it is tangible, it is factual and it is Constitutional. So it is no one’s fault but our own whenever we squander; abuse or neglect it.
The extent to which the electorate fails in any of its constitutional responsibilities -including those to acquire and consider pertinent facts about a given political candidate- is the degree to which our government, at all levels, begins to run quickly and thoroughly awry.
We should not fault any person or entity for donating campaign funds in a lawful manner to any political candidate. Such donations have been deemed, time and time again, to be a form of political speech, which is constitutionally protected. Nor should we fault any political candidate for willingly accepting such lawfully donated funds.
But we should fault ourselves whenever we allow others to use those funds to misdirect us from the facts available to us, or from considering those facts critically, or from voting and voting intelligently based upon those facts.
We should fault ourselves, whenever it proves true that our attention spans cannot seem to outlive that of the average toddler; or of a 30-second sound byte; or of poetic, creative and easily remembered campaign slogans; or the information contained on a colorful tri-fold flyer found hanging from our doorknobs.
We, the electorate, must become better than that. We must become more aggressive in our fact-finding. We must become more critical in our thinking. We must become more willing to register, to vote and to vote intelligently.
We must become more willing to hold our elected and appointed officials to a higher standard of performance and conduct and then to visit swift and reasonable consequences upon them when they fail to meet those standards.
We, the electorate, must become better citizens. For if history has shown us nothing else, it has shown us that when we are better citizens; our rights, our freedoms, our treasure, our property and our liberty are all better safeguarded and far less-easily influenced by others.
I very much welcome your questions and your comments.