In a review of Darrell West’s Billionaires, Michael Lewis wonders:
[S]o far the evidence—and evidence here is really just a handful of anecdotes—suggests that rich people, when they seek to influence political outcomes, often are wasting their money. Michael Bloomberg was able to use his billions to make himself mayor of New York City (which seems to have worked out pretty well for New York City), but Meg Whitman piled $144 million of her own money in the streets of California and set it on fire in her failed attempt to become governor. Mitt Romney might actually have been a stronger candidate if he had less money, or at least had been less completely defined by his money. For all the angst caused by the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson and their efforts to unseat Barack Obama, they only demonstrated how much money could be spent on a political campaign while exerting no meaningful effect upon it. …
One trouble for a writer who wants to see the concentration of wealth at the very top chiefly as a political problem is that the politics of the very rich are not all that predictable or consistent. Obviously billionaires are not perfect reflections of the societies they inhabit, but it’s not insane to consider that their quirks and proclivities might be politically self-canceling, like the irrationalities of consumers in models in classical economics, and so might be assumed away. Even on the most obvious political issues, on which you might think all billionaires could agree, they are often at war with each other. In the end, West more or less concludes that even if money cannot directly rig the democracy, and buy political outcomes, the public’s perception that it can will lead to public cynicism, and corrode the democracy. That may be true. But it tells you something when someone sets out to write a book about the effects of rich people on politics and can’t do any better than that.
The Dish 