Last week the Boston Globe reported that the Josh Kraft-supporting SuperPAC Your City, Your Future will spend $2.4 million in the coming weeks to attack Mayor Michelle Wu. Globe columnist Adrian Walker registered his disapproval but also concluded that SuperPAC spending is “a standard feature of politics.” That assumes the public has become pacified by the routinization of billionaire spending to control our government. Instead, Bostonians should demand accountability from Kraft and the billionaires.
On an important level Walker is correct. Billionaire SuperPACs have become familiar in nearly every substantial political campaign and enjoy the assumption that they are run independently of the candidate’s campaign. Billionaire SuperPACs are legal but that does not make them legitimate. We are all deluded if we believe we are living in a democracy, when the wealthy choose the office holders and the rest of us scuffle for table scraps.
This isn’t a presidential candidate summonsing oil barons to press them for $1,000,000,000 in SuperPAC spending in exchange for scuttling environmental regulations. Only Donald Trump is that obvious.
Instead, as former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer recently explained, politicians for the most part are not people who know better but are influenced by money. They are people money trusts to put in power.
In the case of Dad Robert Kraft, his billionaire buddies have stepped up. One of Robert Kraft’s pals, Michael Rubin of the Boston neighborhood of Conshohocken, PA has given $1,000,000 already.
Another $1,000,000 came in from billionaire Jim Davis, the New Balance chair who apparently has a thing for Mayor Wu. Davis’s 2021 campaign against Wu is instructive. As shown by the Dorchester Reporter’s Gintautas Dumcius (now with CommonWealth Beacon), Davis summonsed mayoral candidates to audition before him. Davis’s communications consultant George Regan explained “The candidates always talk to us.”
Some politicians will submit to a lengthy individual audition before you too, if you have a budget like Davis.
If not, voters should press Kraft at every stop, demanding to know if he has had any discussions with his father about the SuperPAC, and what discussions Josh may know of Robert Kraft having with his own wealthy associates. Voters should ask Josh Kraft what qualities he thinks Jim Davis is seeking in a mayor that would induce Davis to sink $1,000,000 into the SuperPAC backing Kraft. They should ask the same question about Rubin and all the other wealthy donors to the SuperPAC. They should ask if Kraft has ever discussed his campaign with Davis, or with Rubin, or with any of the other wealthy individuals who have donated to Your City, Your Future. Voters should demand Kraft disavow Your City, Your Future and insist it stop all activities and disband.
Maybe voters should demand their own meetings with Davis, Rubin, et al.
Voters should do this over, and over, and over, and over.
There are candidates whom money trusts to put in power, and there are candidates who earn the people’s trust to be granted power. If we demand it.
Money never sleeps. Follow the money.
* Some of us of a certain vintage remember a period when Don Gaston owned the Boston Celtics. Don gave the Celtics to his son Paul, prompting the Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy to ever after refer to Paul as “Thanks Dad” Gaston.
“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 . . .
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.”—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 available.]