This is one of the few small assignments I submitted for Political Parties, yet another Nick Goedert class which I loved and found interesting. I decided to start with my favorite response paper I submitted, which was also my highest grade for that type of assignment.
Assignment Directions
In additional to the research papers, each student is responsible for four brief response papers (about 2 pages in length) throughout the semester. Response papers should
respond to and critique one or more reading assigned for the specified day in class.
Response Paper 2
In response to Walking Around the Money by Jeffrey Smith, I found some parts of the article interesting but have many disagreements with the points made in the piece, though it is nearly ten years old and I can’t blame the author for not being an oracle of the politics and electoral statistics to come in the latter half of the 2010s. Before I get into my disagreements I would simply like to note that he’s right on the general issue of campaign finance and how there are dirty financial tactics that have been used not only at the time of his writing but in place today, especially for primary contests. But when it comes to the rest of the piece, the phrase “…Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” comes to mind.
First let me reiterate that I found several paragraphs of this article interesting, particularly the get-out-the-vote operations within some cities, and just how much party bosses, corruption, and political machines still play a part in our politics. Of course, such operations in cities like Philadelphia (as this article cites) are no surprise, it’s witnessable today by looking at the endorsements in the 2022 Democratic primary for US Senate in Pennsylvania, where nominee John Fetterman failed to secure many endorsements from Philadelphia. The paragraph on how clergymen are a part of these was also something I was not exactly aware of, but am not entirely surprised by.
When it comes to Bachmann, the Tea Party-darling at the time: she had a floundering campaign at the time of the Iowa caucuses, with an operation that peaked too early in the primary/caucus process. The pay-for-play move was not only an act of desperation by a campaign that was dead on arrival but a failure at that; Bachmann didn’t win a single county in Iowa, even in the State Senator’s district.
I’d also like to note that the author predicting that Republicans would try and engage their most conservative [Christian] voters to turn out with “consulting contracts with prominent leaders” is absolutely laughable in retrospect – Donald Trump had an easy job turning out these voters. Romney’s moderate record in a deep blue state with an oddball religious faith in American politics just made him a terrible option for Republicans in turning out their base in 2012. That’s not to say Trump is a choir boy and thus was able to excite Christian conservatives with his devout faith; his erratic record with pretty conservative stances on issues like immigration was enough for the base to overlook his less-than-Christian comments.
I also found the insinuation at times in the piece that such tactics in general elections are paramount and/or influential to be pretty dated to the politics of the past; turnout in 2014 was abysmal, with closer to a third of eligible voters turning out, yet four years later in 2018 a majority of eligible voters participated. Not to mention, of course, the fact that the 2020 election had the highest turnout in over 100 years for eligible voters, with ⅔ of the country participating. A big asterisk should be attached to this though given how many African-Americans did not have the right to vote in little than more than the first half of the twentieth century.