But I worry that there was also another change at work. Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means — law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.
And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways — I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways — I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural parts of the state.
Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population — that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.
And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don’t want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you haven’t changed Washington, and you’ve made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of least resistance — of fund-raisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops — starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.
THERE ARE OTHER forces at work on a senator. As important as money is in campaigns, it’s not just fund-raising that puts a candidate over the top. If you want to win in politics — if you don’t want to lose — then organized people can be just as important as cash, particularly in the low-turnout primaries that, in the world of the gerrymandered political map and divided electorates, are often the most significant race a candidate faces. Few people these days have the time or inclination to volunteer on a political campaign, particularly since the day-to-day tasks of working on a campaign generally involve licking envelopes and knocking on doors, not drafting speeches and thinking big thoughts. And so, if you are a candidate in need of political workers or voter lists, you go where people are already organized. For Democrats, this means the unions, the environmental groups, and the prochoice groups. For Republicans, it means the religious right, local chambers of commerce, the NRA, and the antitax organizations.
I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term “special interests,” which lumps together ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of special-ed kids. Most political scientists would probably disagree with me, but to my mind, there’s a difference between a corporate lobby whose clout is based on money alone, and a group of like-minded individuals — whether they be textile workers, gun aficionados, veterans, or family farmers — coming together to promote their interests; between those who use their economic power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool their votes to sway their representatives. The former subvert the very idea of democracy. The latter are its essence.
Still, the impact of interest groups on candidates for office is not always pretty. To maintain an active membership, keep the donations coming in, and be heard above the din, the groups that have an impact on politics aren’t fashioned to promote the public interest. They aren’t searching for the most thoughtful, well-qualified, or broad-minded candidate to support. Instead, they are focused on a narrow set of concerns — their pensions, their crop supports, their cause. Simply put, they have an ax to grind. And they want you, the elected official, to help them grind it.
During my own primary campaign, for example, I must have filled out at least fifty questionnaires. None of them were subtle. Typically they would contain a list of ten or twelve questions, phrased along the following lines: “If elected, will you solemnly pledge to repeal the Scrooge Law, which has resulted in widows and orphans being kicked to the curb?”
Time dictated that I fill out only those questionnaires sent by organizations that might actually endorse me (given my voting record, the NRA and National Right to Life, for example, did not make the cut), so I could usually answer “yes” to most questions without any major discomfort. But every so often I would come across a question that gave me pause. I might agree with a union on the need to enforce labor and environmental standards in our trade laws, but did I believe that NAFTA should be repealed? I might agree that universal health care should be one of the nation’s top priorities, but did it follow that a constitutional amendment was the best way to achieve that goal? I found myself hedging on such questions, writing in the margins, explaining the difficult policy choices involved. My staff would shake their heads. Get one answer wrong, they explained, and the endorsement, the workers, and the mailing list would all go to the other guy. Get them all right, I thought, and you have just locked yourself into the pattern of reflexive, partisan jousting that you have promised to help end.
Say one thing during the campaign and do another thing once in office, and you’re a typical, two-faced politician.
I lost some endorsements by not giving the right answer. A couple of times, a group surprised us and gave me their endorsement despite a wrong answer.
And then sometimes it didn’t matter how you filled out your questionnaire. In addition to Mr. Hull, my most formidable opponent in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate was the Illinois state comptroller, Dan Hynes, a fine man and able public servant whose father, Tom Hynes, happened to be a former state senate president, Cook County assessor, ward committeeman, Democratic National Committee member, and one of the most well-connected political figures in the state. Before even entering the race, Dan had already sewn up the support of 85 of the 102 Democratic county chairmen in the state, the majority of my colleagues in the state legislature, and Mike Madigan, who served as both Speaker of the House and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party. Scrolling down the list of endorsements on Dan’s website was like watching the credits at the end of a movie — you left before it was finished.