So What Does NBA Basketball Have to do With Campaign Finance Reform Anyway?

By Adonal Foyle, Founder of Democracy Matters

During my college years at Colgate I was upset when I heard people talk about how apathetic our generation is. I never believed them. I believe that our generation is extremely political but they simply feel that they cannot make a difference. Further they were spread out over several issues — environment, gender issues, civil rights, homelessness. Democracy Matters focuses on campaign finance — the most basic issues that affects all the other issues — and therefore brings all the groups together in a coalition. By getting big money out of politics we can restore democracy — the voice of all the people.

I founded Democracy Matters to give students a voice in the growing movement on campaign finance reform. I believe for this movement to be successful we need the creativity, enthusiasm, and presence of students.

Now let’s look at what NBA basketball has to do with campaign finance reform.

There is no buying your way into the NBA with money. You are good enough or not; and that is the bottom line. The same holds true once you are in the league. As veteran athletes, we never have the security of resting on our laurels. At any point in our career, we can lose our job to a younger or superior player. To stay in the NBA, players like myself need to improve and find ways to continue to compete – and win — against serious challengers.

In my case, this means that even during the off season you will find me doing everything from running several miles a day, going to a big man’s camp to work on my offensive moves, or finding a league where I can play against players who will challenge me to get better. Incumbent players may have a slight advantage because they are more experienced and understand better how the system works. But despite the fact that rookies are prone to the blunders of inexperience, it is their talent — not money or connections — that will determine whether they unseat an incumbent for a spot on a team. The opportunity to bring performance to the table and be judged solely on that basis represents the ideal of justice an ideal that is approximated in the world of professional basketball.

A player who has the ability to make it to the NBA can come from anywhere. I myself was raised on a tiny island in the Caribbean with a population of about five hundred people. There I did not even have the luxury of watching basketball on TV, because we had no electricity. My idea of professional sports was spending a week listening to a cricket match on a small transistor radio. I had never seen or touched a basketball until I moved to a nearby island to go to high school when I was fifteen. When I finally discovered basketball, none of my friends or I could afford to buy sneakers or even a ball. We played barefoot, moving as quickly as we could so that the sun did not roast our feet on the hot concrete court. When we were able to find someone with a ball, we had to be really careful not to call a foul on the owner, because if we did, he would get mad and take his ball and go home.

The only criterion for entrance is athletic prowess. So long as he or she is deemed able to play at the highest level, they will get that chance.

In very much the same way, politics should give all of our gifted and talented citizens an equal chance to compete to serve in political life. They must be given this opportunity without the interference of wealth or connections, but on the basis of their talents. Incumbents too should face real challenges. Elected politicians must be able to stay in office if and only if they are more in tune with the needs of their constituencies and if they continue to demonstrate that they are on the cutting edge of political creativity. Their re-election should not be determined by the fact that they have access to more money and connections than their challengers.

However, in politics today this is not the case. In the current system of campaign financing, having the desire or the ability to be a good political leader is not enough. This system is not fair because it requires so much money to run for office, thus giving an unfair advantage to wealthy candidates, or to people willing to sell themselves to wealthy donors. Unlike getting into the NBA on the merit of your skills, politics predominantly relies on the size of your own bank account or on your spending time sitting in a room making calls and begging wealthy people and special interests for money. Unfortunately in our political system, incumbents win a majority of the time not because they are trying to find ways of making our country great, but because they have a huge fundraising advantage over challengers. Incumbents can and do use their positions to extract money from groups and individuals who want legislative favors. That’s why so many of them are continually returned to office.

Our system of campaign financing creates another kind of injustice. Instead of making good policies that contribute to the well-being of the society as a whole, politicians make decisions that benefit wealthy campaign contributors. Public policy suffers because politicians are swayed by the huge dollar signs that wealthy donors represent. In the NBA, the rules of the game mean that no team has a greater advantage than any other in vying for a championship. Even for the Golden State Warriors, whose record this year was a mere 17 wins and a whopping sixty-five losses, every night we came on the court we had an equal chance to win. And believe it or not, sometimes we did! The rules of play in the NBA are fair.

It is not an unattainable stretch to think that politics might be as just and fair as professional sports. After all it is a bit more important! Thus I believe we must fight for a political system that makes our political leaders focus on creating good public policies. To do this we need a system of rules for playing the game that is fair for everyone, where everyone’s voice can be heard, and which does not allow private money to dictate social policies.

Campaign finance reform is an issue that is universal. It is important to anyone who cares about the integrity of democracy. In a democracy, elections should be an arena like sports, where you do not buy your way to power.

Now let me be clear. I do not hate money. Money affords you the opportunity to do a lot of good things. For me it has meant sending my brother and sister to college, buying a home, and starting an organization like democracy matters. The problem is not money, the problem is the manner in which money is used. The problem is not rich people; the problem is the manner in which rich people use campaign contributions to control our political system.

Real democracy on the other hand has to allow everyone an equal opportunity to influence political decisions, regardless of your race, gender or sexual preference, and regardless of your wealth. If basketball were like politics today — where unskilled people can buy their way into the league, where older players positions are secure not because of superior skills but because of their influential connections and greater wealth, and where the rules only work for a few players, while others are put at a disadvantage in influencing the outcome of a game — no one would ever watch.

What makes basketball attractive to a lot of people is its fairness – that it affords everyone the opportunity to compete on an even playing field; that on any given night, anyone can win. Politics on the other hand drives people nuts, because it is not fair. People are upset with the inequality that exists, and as a result democracy is threatened. Just as they wouldn’t participate in sports that were unfairly rigged to give wealthy people and special interests an overwhelming advantage, we should not be surprised – only alarmed – when people refuse to vote or participate in what they believe is a rigged political system.

Fundamentally, I believe that private money should not drive our political system. It should not be the determining factor of whether a candidate gets elected to office or whether certain laws are passed. There are important spheres in society that should remain separate from the control of private wealth. Policies that affect all of us — such as health care, education, civil rights — must be areas where influence cannot be measured by the size of an individual’s bank account.

As an NBA player, my responsibility is not only to try to do my job on the court or to be a good citizen in the world of basketball. I am involved in the union as the player representative for my team, because I believe that player’s rights should not be violated by powerful owners. Whether or not, as professional athletes, we consider ourselves to be role models, the fact is that what we do as is observed closely by the society at large. I believe that we have a moral responsibility to help to bring awareness of injustice to the public and to help correct it. That’s why I am involved in the movement for campaign finance reform – why I think that public financing campaign reform is vital to democracy. Democracy Matters, in particular, can help repair our political system by bringing young people together to fight the corrupting effect of private money in politics.