The Political-Industrial Complex (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

In January 1961, three days before he left office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a televised farewell speech that today seems both prescient and quaint.

In it, the first president to be constitutionally limited to two four-year terms complimented Congress, which was controlled by his fellow Republicans only during his first two years in office.

“… Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship…. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.”

Can you imagine our current president saying something like that come January 2016?

Then Eisenhower got down to the business for which this speech is best known: His warning about the “military-industrial complex,” the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” that was still relatively new in post-War World II America.

The five-star general and first Supreme Allied Commander in Europe was, of course, no peacenik. But he worried about a “disastrous rise of misplaced power” and exhorted Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” and not to “let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

I’ll let readers decide for themselves whether we heeded Eisenhower’s warning as well as we should have. My purpose today is to draw a parallel between Ike’s military-industrial complex and what has been called the political-industrial complex: the conjunction of an immense political establishment and a large political campaign industry that has been on steroids since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2009.

I still have some PTSD from the midterm elections, during which every innocent attempt to watch a TV show turned into a race to reach the mute button or to skip forward if I’d been smart enough to set my DVR. As our Lee Hogan has reported, Arkansans were subjected to 96,000 campaign ads at a cost of $41.1 million, and almost one-fifth of the money was spent in the two weeks leading up to the Nov. 4 election. Were you still undecided at that point? Tom Cotton, who trounced Mark Pryor in the most expensive of the races, said afterward that the contest was never really close.

In other words, you suffered through all those Cotton and Pryor ads for no reason. The money was wasted. But someone profited — the consultants, the writers and producers, the media buyers who placed them and the TV and radio stations that sold advertising time. They all made money long after the messages reached the point of diminishing returns. And those organizations that you’d never heard of that collected all the “dark money” from donors that they don’t have to identify — well, they made money too.

People will do what they are incented to do. Whether voters like it or not, and whether the money is well-spent or not, we can expect to see more and more and more of the same. And in the wake of Citizens United, there’s not much we can do about it.

There is one proposal floating around that intrigues me. It’s the product of Heather K. Gerken, a professor of law at Yale Law School; Webb Lyons, a Yale law student; and Wade Gibson, director of the Fiscal Policy Center at Connecticut Voices for Children. They propose requiring dark money ads to carry this disclaimer: “This ad was paid for by ‘X,’ which does not disclose the identity of its donors.”

“That could help voters figure out how much trust to put in the ad,” the three authors wrote in an April 3 opinion column in the Washington Post.

Requiring disclaimers on political ads has already passed constitutional muster, even in the Citizens United decision, which reiterated the governmental interest in providing voters with information about the sources of election spending.

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I like to think that, if Eisenhower were around today, he’d tell us to guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the political-industrial complex. I like to think I’d have the same fears if newspapers like this one were beneficiaries of all that advertising spending.

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Last week, the 12th Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Little Rock’s own Gen. Wesley Clark, tweeted out that he was “Ready for Hillary,” and so did a lot of other people. It was a trending thing on Twitter, you see.

Here’s what I tweeted on the subject: “I’m ready for a break from politics, politicians and campaigns. That’s what I’m ready for.”

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com.