On the Right - The Universalist Candidate - how wealth could affect election campaigns of Delaware Senator William Roth and New Jersey congressional candidate Jon Corzine - Brief Article

National Review, July 3, 2000 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, MAY 26

I joined recently with a group who were urging the reelection of William Roth to a sixth term in the Senate. Sen. Roth is well remembered by those who care about taxes and supply-side economics. He was cosponsor of the famous Kemp-Roth bill, which, as introduced (it was slightly modified), called for a three-time, 10 percent, top-to- bottom reform in federal tax levies. There was no nonsense about insulating the rich: The idea was evenhanded reform, and a generation later, Bill Roth became chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Roth now has a vexing problem. He is well connected, but he needs $4 million to make his race as designed, and that is a lot of money for a state as small as Delaware, given the limitation on the sum of money people are permitted to spend on other people. What is especially vexing is that television in Delaware comes in from Phil a delphia, Baltimore, and Washington. What this means is that for every dollar spent on political advertising intended to influence Delaware citizens, 95 cents spills off into neighboring states, of no use whatever to William Roth, and of zero interest to non-Delaware voters.

Now the same problem, on a lesser scale, hits candidates in New Jersey, who need to rely on New York and Phil adelphia stations, losing a gob of TV money that flutters off to non-New Jersey voters. This is a very real problem, but not a problem at all to Jon Corzine. You see, he is very, very rich, and so anxious to become a U.S. senator that he has already spent $25 million. The record expenditure for a Senate seat has been Michael Huffington's in California in 1994. At the rate Corzine is going ($300,000 per day), he will outpace Huffington before he is through with the primary, and already has done so hugely on a per capita voter scale, California being about four times more populous than New Jersey.

What is Jon Corzine so excited about, the usual concerns of vanity to one side? Well, Mr. Corzine is best described as a universalist. He is a middle westerner who got a degree from the University of Chicago, came to New York, enrolled in Goldman Sachs, before long found himself head dog of Midas, Inc., and decided to stop making money for himself and instead to treat everybody else to money belonging to everybody else. What happens, of course, is that people end up receiving from Washington the money they just finished sending to Washington, or perhaps only a part of it. Candidate Corzine was embarrassed, in a recent debate with primary contender Jim Florio, to be reminded that a while ago he had lamented that New Jersey was only getting 65 cents back from Washington for every dollar remitted to Washington.

Anyway, like Roth, Corzine has the undifferentiated-dollar problem going to television ads, but unlike Roth, he can afford extravagance in search of his universalist aims. These are, to read from his own campaign literature:

"Universal health-care coverage;

"Universal long-term care;

"Universal quality public education

[What would he do with non-quality teachers? Fire them? He might discuss this with the American Federation of Teachers.];

"Universal gun registration and licensing;

"Universal access and opportunity."

The only universals left out are universal beauty, brains, and enterprise; perhaps Jon Corzine will work on that tectonic fault in the human structure, but that argument will probably carry over into another world.

We have then in Delaware and in New Jersey a common anomaly: the political dollar that can't hope to reach the intended voters without a huge attrition, adding up to dollars wasted, and political effort misspent. Is there anything to be learned from this extravagance? Or is the sad lesson of it that more and more we are heading into situations in which only the rich can successfully contend? Those who worry whether there would then be ideological competition need hardly lose patience. Jon Corzine is one more example of rich ignorance. The idea of universalizing prosperity by edict, rather than growth, is hospitably received in the homes and offices of the wealthy. Such impulses are very much to be welcomed and applauded when they evolve in individual contributions to the needy (Jon Corzine subsidizes eight parochial schools), but the itch quickly transforms to giving others' money to needy enterprises and when that is done resolutely enough, everybody who doesn't live in the Cayman Islands loses out.

So here are two races rich in symbolism. The dutiful senator who respects private wealth, and the aspirant senator who deplores it.