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By Dave Eggers
Editor's note: This is Episode 11 of Dave Eggers' novel in progress. To read previous episodes, click here.
Mar. 02, 2004 | Rebecca was feeling cornered, flustered, chiefly because she knew the students were right -- if none of them had ever donated to a candidate, and none had even known anyone who had put their money into the political process, then something, or everything, was broken -- and it was then that Rebecca felt that certain upsurge within her, a rising of her waters. Her eyes closed temporarily, her chin thrown back, her nostrils flared, and then she snapped again to attention and was transformed.
"I have every intention of running a clean and honest campaign," she said, a little too loudly, "and I will not bend or break any campaign finance laws in the process. But while I'm obeying these rules, I will be lamenting, as you no doubt do, the state of affairs in which we find ourselves, where 85 percent of the time, the Senate candidate who spends the most money prevails. Now what in God's name is going on? How can this be tolerated? In the House of Representatives, this statistic is much more dire: There, 94 percent of the time, the victor is he or she who has paid the most money for the office. As citizens, we accept this. We accept as logical the notion that money is a form of free speech, that money is just another form of support from a constituency and is therefore a measure of a movement, a corollary to consensus. I have run campaigns where money was raised and spent and indeed, in my first two races, I was elected each time in part because I raised more money, chiefly from unions and trial lawyers, than my opponents."
The class was struck dumb. A few among them gasped, in part because it seemed that Rebecca's very voice had been replaced; it seemed a scary kind of puppetry, this new voice -- lower, more resonant, almost tremulous -- and for those among the class who had seen too many exorcism movies, it was unsettling.
"And in times of weakness," she continued, "I assume that this is the way that campaigns will always and indeed must be run, and that because this system has more or less been in place since the beginning of the republic, then it's right enough and strong enough to hold us in good stead -- that the goodness of the American people will ensure that this country will ford whatever waters the weakness of the system allows to endanger us. But there is a tiny part of me, alive and thinking crazily in the smallest hours, that believes that things have spun out of our control, that the stakes are now too high, that when elections promise to cost 1 billion dollars within our lifetimes -- and the presidential election will likely top that this very year -- then it is time for revolution."
One of the students, a pale frail boy in the back, fainted. A large female student kneeled to the floor to care for him. The rest of the class was rapt; a few were drooling.
"Right now, however, we're in the last stages of something like a spectacular weapons buildup. And though everyone is terrified, though everyone lives under the specter of immolation, no one wants to be the first to disarm. But we all know that the only way to make a dent in this system, and to start to turn it around, to reinvent it, to explode it and start over, is to prove that it can be done. We'll never get an unadulterated campaign finance bill through Congress, in part because no one can see a system not driven by money. We must, therefore, prove that a candidate can run a campaign, and even get elected, without buying -- excuse the pun -- in to the system, and by that I don't mean by not taking donations, or taking only certain kinds of donations, taking them only online, or not taking donations over $100, or whatever. I mean a candidate must run and win without spending any money whatsoever. No money accepted, no money spent -- the purest way possible, a campaign of ideas and nothing else, a campaign of hustle and sweat, brains and legwork.
"And when I have contemplated this possibility, I have realized that to be successful one would need an army, one would need ten volunteers for every one of the opponent's, all doing all the work by hand that the opponent might do with cash. Where candidates customarily buy the public's attention, this campaign would earn it, would cajole and sustain it. And once it had begun, once it was -- and it would be destined to be -- a movement, the message of that candidate, would come across with a purity previously unknown, unmitigated and -- " Rebecca blinked slowly, as if awakening from a sleep, but then fell back in -- "Only by doing it could you prove that it could be done. If by sheer force of will, humans could build a wall seen from space, or dig a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, then surely we can prove that elections need not be contests of fundraising. It's just plain dismal, and we deserve better. We deserve to once again be inspired; we deserve, above all, a renewal of faith. Goddamnit, that's the main thing -- we should be allowed to have faith!"
And with that, with her own shrill voice, Rebecca snapped out of her reverie and found herself in front of a drooling, fainting, heavy breathing group of students. She glanced at the clock, saw that she was 10 minutes over her allotted time, and assumed that whatever she'd been saying -- and she had no idea -- had gone on much too long and was boring the students into what was quite literally a stupor. Giacomo was gone, Max was gone, and Rebecca was left with the glazed-over stares of the class, and in her embarrassment, she apologized and walked out of the room.
What the hell was she going on about? She was late to her engagement at Buzzard Hall anyway, which now she dreaded to no end, but still she walked briskly there, hoping and expecting that there would be no attendees.
-- By Dave Eggers
