Money Turned This Pol Into a Telemarketer

Author: Peter H. Kostmayer.
Published in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

For 14 years, I was a United States congressman from Pennsylvania.

First elected in 1979, I spent about $50,000 on my campaign. Today, Philadelphia area candidates can spend more than that on prime-time TV ads in just a single evening.

Times have changed. But maybe, just maybe, they're about to change again in a way that will put special interests-good, bad and indifferent-in their place.

In the Philadelphia suburbs, campaigning from door to door like an old-fashioned salesperson was, for me, the key to victory in the '70's. I kept up a fast trot down the middle of a typical suburban street, while campaign volunteers knocked on doors, left and right. Dashing back and forth, I shook hands, peered in through the open front doors of startled homeowners, and chatted briefly with them.

I met thousands of people, if only briefly.

When I wasn't doing "door to door," I was standing outside supermarkets or visiting small suburban fairs, fire company suppers and neighborhood picnics.

But, always, I was listening to the people I wanted to represent. And I was learning about their problems-about a child who had to leave college because tuition was just too high or about laid-off parents.

I won that 1976 election, just barely, by 1,312 votes to become the first Democrat to represent Bucks County since the 1930's. I was easily re-elected in 1978. Then came television.

In 1980, I faced a tough Republican opponent. In a difficult year for Democrats, he bought TV ads-lots of them.

I cut back on the door-to-door. Instead, holed up in a small room, I worked the phones and raised much more money than in my first race just four years earlier.

But it was too little, too late.

He won. I lost. The era of television campaigning had begun.

Two years later, in 1982, I was now the challenger. But I was determined not to be outspent again. So I raised as much as my opponent, went on TV, and won the seat back by about 2,000 votes. I won four more elections, often by a hair. But in 1992, I lost again.

Last year, after being out of office for six years, I ran again in an early, crowded field of Democrats for the chance to face our state's junior Republican senator, Rick Santorum.

I didn't go door to door anymore.

I didn't attend a single picnic or stand at even one shopping center.

Not only didn't I talk to voters, the only time I saw them was on the elevator in a Center City Philadelphia building on my way to an office where I dialed for dollars, nearly every day.

My fund-raising staff of six-no press secretary, no field organizer, no volunteer coordinator, no research assistant-gave me the names of people who could do two things: Give money-hopefully, the legal limit of $1,000-and raise money. I spent my days talking to people about money, money, money.

That was my new world in 1999-very small, very narrow, and very rich. I needed to raise $50,000, not for an entire campaign, but virtually every week.

There are only two groups of people who benefit from this system-the people who make the calls and the people who get them.

But everyone else pays the price when good people, voters and politicians alike, simply quit participating. Increasingly, ordinary Americans won't run and don't vote.

Campaign reform seemingly doesn't touch them like crime or education or unemployment or the illness of an elderly parent.

This is a conversation America as a whole will never have until political leaders start it.

After 10 election campaigns of my own, I know this much: If voters insist on real change, they actually get it, once in a while. But if voters don't demand major campaign reform, it will never, ever happen. As far as money and elections are concerned, small change just doesn't matter.

Peter H. Kostmayer served seven terms as a member of Congress from Pennsylvania. He is now executive director of the national nonprofit environmental organization Zero Population Growth.