Summary: that Palm Springs city Council hopeful Geoff Kors has been able to raise nearly $150k in campaign contributions during the first six months of this year is a tribute to his skill at political fundraising, but also raises significant questions about the extent to which access to elected public service in Palm Springs is hedged about with class and racial accessibility barriers. When a council campaign in a city smaller than Cathedral City can be expected to cost on the order of $300,000, there is a very clear message that public service is only for the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Latinos and other people of color, working people and the middle class, need not apply. Will Palm Springs be shocked by the price tag for public service and enact "reforms?" Will those "reforms" have the usual-for-Palm Springs effect of rigging the system in favor of incumbents and wealthy candidates? Will the city fathers and mothers in Palm Springs, as before, pull the ladder of success up behind them?
Last week, our local Gannett newspaper reported that Palm Springs city Council hopeful Geoff Kors had received $147,343 in campaign contributions during the first six months of calendar 2015.
Obviously, Kors is very, very good at raising money. Props to him from a purely pragmatic political perspective; certainly he shows mad skills at political fundraising. To be able to raise that kind of money, even from a Palm Springs demographic where residents simply have more discretionary money to throw around, is not unimpressive. I have some personal experience from which I can speak; during my first and victorious run four city Council in Cathedral City, in 2002, I was victorious on a grand total of roughly $10,000 in cash and $3000 in in-kind contributions. On 13K, I was able to run a successful campaign.
But as effective as Geoff Kors is in raising money, it’s still fair to ask what kind of message the substantial campaign price tags we routinely encounter in Palm Springs elections may be sending. If we extrapolate the rate at which Mr. Kors has been raising money out till November, he will have raised nearly $300,000 in order to secure election to a city Council seat in a smaller city than Cathedral City, where the salary is still quite nominal.
When city Council races begin to cost of that kind of money, public service begins to look very much like a One Percent proposition; public service looks like an occupation of One Percenters. Running for public office looks very much in Palm Springs like an enterprise limited by its nature to the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. When a council race comes in at close to $300,000, it becomes pretty clear that Latinos and other persons of color, working people, and the ordinary middle-class need not apply. What kind of race and class messages are being sent?
Now would be a good time for the residents of our Western neighboring city to take a long hard look at the extent to which they, themselves, have rigged the system in such a way that the body politic in Palm Springs has come to resemble government of the One Percent, by the One Percent, and for the One Percent.
Because there does seem to be something more than a little offputting about small town Council races being so expensive. Again, one hesitates to analogize to one’s own political experience, but it certainly goes without saying that a city council hopeful in Palm Springs with $13,000 at his or her disposal would stand absolutely no chance in a system that has been “reformed” in a way that protects incumbents and candidates with sufficient private wealth to be able either to self fund or to create a sufficiently efficient fundraising infrastructure to scare off any opponent.
And certainly, Mr. Kors’s astonishing success in raising six figures in six months, and his willingness to publicize it, bespeaks not only a high order of fundraising sophistication, but also a kind of sheer cutthroat political savvy. After all, what less- well-funded candidate would not feel some real hesitation taking on a man with a apparently unlimited fundraising ability? I don’t blame Geoff Kors for doing what the law lets him get away with doing; he himself is not the problem; he is, however, a symptom of the way in which we have allowed money to corrupt the integrity of our political system at every level.
Of course, once the election is over, and the city fathers and mothers in Palm Springs take a look at the amounts of money that were spent in what is essentially a third or fourth tier municipal election, there will no doubt be calls for some kind of campaign finance “reform.”
And yes, I do put skepticism quotes around the word “reform,” because like so many so-called reforms, any so-called campaign finance reform Palm Springs implements will be largely intended to protect incumbents and independently wealthy candidates in the future. Most so-called good government reforms wind up having the effect of penalizing the least well resourced, the least well-off, and the least well connected in any given body politic. We should expect nothing less in Palm Springs, where the city fathers and the city mothers have a history of pulling the ladder of success up behind them.
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Nothing in the preceding is intended, and nothing in the preceding should be construed as, legal advice. The opinions stated herein are the author's own.
