Media Musings: Distorting political process dangerous
You may not know the legal attacks now possible in an election, but Rep. Bobby Sands, who’s running for one of the three open seats in the state Senate, does and admits it’s puzzling why he’s become a target this year.
Sands is a Columbia attorney who graduated from MTSU and was one of the fine announcers at the Celebration in Shelbyville. He’s loved politics since his undergraduate years and is highly respected.
In the turmoil of the last session, Sands, after months of reflection and debate, joined with the Senate majority and voted for the tax increase, which will fund the state only for one or two years before the crisis reappears. State tax collections are already nearly $4 million behind projections.
He’s campaigning for the 13th Senate District which consists of western Rutherford County, Maury, Marshall and Lincoln counties as a Democrat. His opponent is Bill Ketron, a Republican, Murfreesboro insurance executive.
Now comes the reemergence of the Tennessee Forum, a group it’s doubtful you know or have heard of directly. But you really do.
The forum spent $150,000 running anti-Gore ads and was founded in July 2000 by three “soccer dads” with one third of the money coming from Steve McKenzie of Cleveland, a former owners of a chain of payday loan businesses.
This time, the forum has a new board of “stay-at-home moms” which includes Susan Kaestner and Robert Henry, both of Nashville, and Dawn Eades, of Smyna. All of them believe there’s too much waste in government (TennCare) and that the state doesn’t need an income tax, which they claim will take $1 billion from hardworking Tennesseans, a sum yet to be proven, to my knowledge.
Their attack, under the battle flag of the Tennessee Forum, is running radio spots giving Sands the “Golden Duck Award,” a contrivance meant to ridicule him with this copy: “When he talks, smart taxpayers know it’s time to duck.” The print ads link him to the two men who battled for an income tax, Gov. Don Sundquist, a Republican, and House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, a Democrat.
If you add the $70,000 the forum plans to spend and the $40,000 the state GOP has given to Ketron, you now see over $110,000 aimed at Sands, not including the $60,000 Ketron has raised personally. That’s a media budget of $200,000.
Sands has just under $100,000, with the state Democrats saying they will be giving him financial support.
You now need a quick explanation of how the forum has a legal loophole to spend money and never tell you what it really stands for publicly. The ads it is running are called issue ads, and the forum could use any name -?say Tennesseans United for Fair Taxation or Tennesseans Against Tax Abuse – just as easily as the name selected. As long as the forum does not ask for you to vote for or against an individual candidate, it’s legal under federal tax code.
There’s nothing to stop the forum from pumping in $200,000 if it wants to and never care about public reporting to the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance. It has the power – read money – to turn the outcome of the race for the 13th District and Sands knows it.
In the age of media politics, that may prove to be more a romantic notion of American and state politics when one faces the cold truth that one can obtain a victory by buying the airwaves and newspaper placements. This distortion of the political process is dangerous for our modern democracy. Just ask Bobby Sands.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)