The sale is one of several occasions when well-bred fillies and colts are sold to big-bucks owners who project these youngsters as winning major stakes races, perhaps even the Kentucky Derby! Most likely, your purchase will never win a race and maybe never even get into a starting gate. But if you win the Derby, oh boy does the money come rolling in, and prestige, bragging rights . . . but especially money.
And that, I suspect, is why wealthy Republican Christopher W. Collins is bankrolling a SuperPAC to elect Democratic candidate Kim Driscoll for lieutenant governor. How much influence the lt. gov. will have for the next four to eight years will be up to Maura Healey (assuming, as rational people do, that she will be our next governor). But at the end of Healey’s tenure it’s also likely that the next governor will be a Democrat (assuming that the Republican Party does not return to sanity) and who would be the front runner for the gubernatorial nomination? The oh-so friendly and grateful (to their sponsor) lieutenant governor.
Think of it as the political futures market.
Or maybe the nominee will be the attorney general. That’s why I remain suspicious when the spokesperson for the Better Boston Independent Expenditure Political Committee demurs that the committee was only created to support Andrea Campbell in the Boston mayor’s race. It’s no problem to amend its paperwork at OCPF, or just disband and start the Better Massachusetts IEPAC. As I explained in A Better Boston for Oligarchs, the donors were dominated by oligarchs who back school privatization including Jim Walton of the Boston suburb of Arkansas.
When I read Mr. Stout’s story my mind turned to Charles Koch. A few years ago Koch was reflecting that he had spent millions of dollars over decades with little of the expected political return on investment, but his ROI in the past five years or so has skyrocketed.
The point is not only that money never sleeps, but that money can afford to be patient.
I wonder how many SuperPAC donors have ever traveled on the Orange Line?
“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”–Jimmy Carter
[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is now in print.]