Campaigns? Financed.

Republicans will win big. Democrats will lose big. But both, as was confirmed again today, have certainly spent big:

“In the latest sign of this year’s record-breaking spending, an independent research group estimated Wednesday that candidates, parties and outside interest groups together may spend up to $4 billion on the 2010 campaign.

The prediction by the Center for Responsive Politics is the latest evidence of a spending tsunami for 2010, despite its status as an off-election year without a race for the White House. Expenditures have already eclipsed what they were when George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000.”

And this, it would very obviously seem, is strange—if not outwardly problematic. The notion that this campaign cycle’s spending has been high is, at this point, well-trodden territory. Citizens United happened. Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie have proven quite capable as campaign financiers. Again, this is all pretty well established. But $4 billion? On the face things, this simply fails to pass the proverbial smell test.

One has to wonder precisely whose incentives aligned such that dropping a cool $4 billion on this campaign season made sense. Are, in sum, all of the seats up for election worth a few billion dollars? Yes, almost certainly. And, importantly, this is especially true for the folks that will potentially be occupying those seats. In a very straightforward way, then, it makes sense that politicians might spend this sort of big money, if they have it, on their own campaigns. But insomuch as politics is meant to be a pubic service—and, obviously, I recognize that there are other things at play—spending $4 billion on simply getting elected seems, quite frankly, to be wrong.

Though perhaps unanswerable in any sort of concrete sense, one has to wonder how much that last $1 billion or so actually stands to affect the outcomes of this fall’s elections. In what are, once again, pretty firmly established ways, the obscene amounts of capital thrown in the direction of November 2 have made things more negative and aggressive then they might have ordinarily been. And what, it ought to be asked, other than running ads deploring Aqua Buddha or clarifying positions on witchcraft could have been accomplished with some of the $4 billion dolled out for purposes of politicking? The budget crisis certainly wouldn’t have been solved, but a fair number of those still wading through the depths of the recession would no doubt contend that their plight ought to have been prioritized over that of beltway-insiders-to-be.