Money Talks When The Campaign Comes To Town

If there is any residual doubt that modern politics in America is a fractured and dysfunctional blind date, just take note of the blackout of local coverage of the recent Romney campaign’s Republican fundraising blitz that swooped into town for a 3-hit whirlwind on Sunday, July 8th. Raising over $3 million dollars in a matter of hours, the Romney visit was a well-calculated checkbook booster intended to reach into the ready cash of the uber-elite who have carved up prime ocean-front real estate in The Hamptons these the last 20 years.

The resulting press draught is sad yet not surprising in a region where fundraisers of every ilk are tantamount to exhaling during the summer months. Among the non-invited, the most concerted refrain was exasperation over the traffic bottle-neck that stalled the already untenable driving conditions we have become accustomed to morning, noon and night getting in and out of our villages.

Other than the headline-grabbing pre-arrival press coverage which found its way onto the front pages of all our broadsheet weeklies and Internet news blogs, actual real-time reporting on the three fundraisers, from either inside or outside the Secret Service-flanked estate bounds of Ron Perelman’s 56-acre Georgica Pond compound, Julia and David Koch’s Meadow Lane residence and Clifford Sobel’s Southampton beach home just down the lane, was relegated to sound bites snatched from the $5000-lunch plate and $50,000-dinner plate donors as they entered the gated drives.

The 100-plus protestors who were bused in from Manhattan to flank the beachhead off Cooper’s and trek their way to the high-tide line in front of the Koch estate were effectively marginalized in their outrage, equally tempted to take a dip in the 67-degree ocean while chanting “Romney Has A Koch Problem.”

Political ideologies aside, this snatch and run campaign stop was a cynical affair, engineered to buffer the presidential candidate among his devotees long enough for a few choice handshakes while bolstering campaign coffers for the four-and-a-half month presidential sprint ahead. Only the New York Times managed to report from the sidelines on Romney’s remarks which attempted to bridge the vast divide between the accumulated wealth of the attendees and the relative depravity of the voting masses: “If you are here, by and large, you are doing just fine,” he said, his voice audible to a reporter standing on a public street not far away. “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about those here. I spend a lot of time worrying about those that are poor and those in the middle class that are finding it hard to make a bright future for themselves.” (New York Times, July 8, 2012)

Mother Jones, the progressive political national watchdog magazine, and locally, The East Hampton Press, attempted to capture the view from the ground, collecting push-back mainly from the bused-in protestors who rallied at Cooper’s Beach and a cadre of local Occupy supporters who gathered in the Meadow Lane neighborhood. Fewer than a dozen protestors showed up in East Hampton and the arrests of David Fink and Simon Kinsella made the next week’s edition of The East Hampton Star for reportedly colliding their sailboat “with a marine patrol boat stationed along the shoreline of the Creeks, Ron Perelman’s 56-acre estate. In a release, police said the pair had ignored directions to turn away.”

All said and done, raising cash was the clear purpose and the sole local message of Romney’s Hampton’s visit. After decades of over-the-top fundraising summer events, for the lion’s share of what comprises the daily consensus of The Hamptons as its’ multitudes forage from farm stand to surfside, the campaign stop was remote, elite and quickly forgettable.

A presidential candidate came to town and only the power-elite who ponied up for the $25,000 ticket heard what he had to say. The rest of us heard nothing — other than the off- hand accounts of local notables Andew Sabin, Ted Conklin and police officials patrolling errant protestors off the shoreline.

Brace yourselves for round two. Word is out the Democrats are coming in August.