From "Will Wall Steet Be Punished?" by Andrew Leonard:
But let’s not get too excited. What’s money to Wall Street? The $400 million or so spent by Wall Street in support of Romney is a rounding error for the financial sector. If anything, the amount Wall Street spends on lobbying is likely to rise in the next few months, as the battle to finalize Dodd-Frank’s rules hits the home stretch.
That’s right, Dodd-Frank, signed into law by President Obama more than two years ago, is still unfinished. Hundreds of rules have yet to be finalized — including those related to the all-important Volcker rule — the provision of Dodd-Frank that would prevent banks from making proprietary trades with taxpayer-insured capital. Even worse, hundreds of necessary Dodd-Frank rules haven’t even been proposed.
A Romney win wouldn’t have stopped those rules from getting hammered out, although the people making the critical decisions would change, and could be expected to be more receptive to Wall Street “concerns.” The point is, Wall Street is likely to spend even more cash now to lobby the rule-makers than it would have before, despite the hundreds of millions wasted during the campaign. The spigot remains on.
There's been a lot of talk about how these millionaires wasted their money on losing races, as if to point out that money doesn't really influence elections. Money spent stupidly rarely accomplishes anything, and while I'm sure there will always be the wingnut millionaire who will be willing to spend millions on a losing cause, Wall Street will not spend its money stupidly.
I do believe that people numbers can beat money numbers when the electorate is aroused and relatively well informed, and as been pointed out ad nauseam the demographics favor the more liberal party in the future. But people numbers only matter in the outside game, in elections. The smart money will realize, if it doesn't already, that it can only do so much to influence who gets elected in coming years, and that it can be far more effective in the inside game--coopting these elected officials once they arrive in D.C. or Olympia, Albany, or Sacramento.
The inside game is much easier and more predictable game to play--and cheaper--because the money interests need only to capture one or two senators on this committee or that to block a bill or gut it. The money game is an inside game, and it's way too complex and technical to ever mobilize the electorate to care about it.
People like Larry Lessig realize it. He was rather eloquent in the closing minutes of the video I posted the other day in talking about it and how we have to fight it anyway. His sentiments were very close to those of the Reinhold Niebuhr quote in this blog's epigraph at the top of the page about the vision of a just society being "an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible." I don't know if Lessig is a believer in the conventional sense, but you have to be in some other sense to say what he said.
And the key word in that quote is "approximated"--we're not talking about achieving a just society, just doing what we can to push back against the enormous forces that could care less about such a thing.