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The 2002 Senate race in Colorado cost nearly $11 million when you combine the spending by all candidates. It's safe to predict this year's, with the prospect of primaries in both major parties, will cost considerably more.
So we can assume that a candidate needs to raise a minimum of $6 million in the 238 days remaining until Nov. 2. That works out to $25,210 a day -- every day, including Sundays and holidays.
Just how any candidate will find time to shake hands, speak at rubber-chicken dinners and kiss babies is a good question, when the costs of campaigning will require spending much time around People of Money and listening to their prudent and unselfish advice about how the federal government might borrow even more money so as to reduce their tax burdens while subsidizing their enterprises.
It wasn't supposed to work like that. The federal constitution of 1787 established three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial. Of that, only one half on one branch, the House of Representatives, was directly elected by the people.
Judges were appointed by the president and confirmed by
the Senate; they were not elected. The executive was chosen
by the Electoral College, whose members were chosen by
state legislatures, so the president and vice-president
were not directly elected. And the Senate of the United
States shall be composed of two Senators from each State,
chosen by the Legislature thereof.
In essence, senators represented the state governments, and many of the Founding Fathers saw the Senate as a conservative brake on the presumed radical impulses of the House, the body closest to the people.
Over time, especially during the Gilded Age of the late
19th century, others saw the U.S. Senate as a
millionaire's club
which blocked most progressive
legislation. Another problem arose when legislatures were
divided between parties and couldn't agree on a senator.
Indiana went without one senator for two years in the 1850s
on that account, and Delaware went four years without one
starting in 1899.
Senate contests also inspired corruption in the state
legislatures; the U.S. Senate Historical Office says that
Intimidation and bribery marked some of the states'
selection of senators. Nine bribery cases were brought
before the Senate between 1866 and 1906.
Colorado had its own senate-race sensation in 1883. Sen. Henry M. Teller had been appointed Secretary of the Interior. There were 30 days left in his current term, and there was the following six-year term.
The result was a spirited contest between Thomas Bowen of Del Norte, a lawyer, legislator, and mining magnate now known only to hard-core Colorado history buffs, and Horace Austin Warner Tabor of Leadville, the lame-duck lieutenant governor and a mining magnate who is still famous.
Both spent money freely at the statehouse. As one state
history recounts, Many of the mining kings bought their
offices.
The Bowen-Tabor contest, which took 96 ballots
and 11 days, is often considered the prime example of
the prostitution of politics.
Duane Smith's biography of Tabor provides more details
about this senate contest. The prize seemed worth any
cost. Political ethics and morals were discarded,
apparently by all the candidates. Even before the caucus
started, Tabor was accused of trying to bribe a Ouray
representative.
Tabor had some image problems at the time, since the
public was becoming aware that his marriage to Augusta was
crumbling. Rumors flew that he had taken up with a buxom
divorcee, Elizabeth Baby Doe
McCourt.
He stayed in the contest, though. As Smith recounts,
Tabor had for some days apparently been offering money
to secure votes,
and his main fixer and bagman, Billy
Bush, admitted under oath that he paid out varied sums
to undisclosed people to smooth the way.
Even so, Tabor's millions couldn't buy him the six-year Senate term he wanted. Bowen got it. The Republican legislature, by way of consolation to a generous donor, offered Tabor the 30-day term, which he accepted.
During that month, he married Baby Doe in an ostentatious wedding which was something of a scandal in itself, since there were legal questions about his divorce from Augusta.
Reformers of the era used such spectacles to promote the
direct election of U.S. senators as a cure. A
constitutional amendment was adopted in 1913, and that was
supposed to purify politics by giving the people, rather
than the Money Power,
the right to choose
senators.
Even so, there's that $25,210 a day for a modern senate seat -- far more than Tabor spent in 1883.
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