Short excerpt from CHAPTER NINE
Senators Byrd and Rockefeller
“The Aristocracy of the Money Bag”
Then, as explained by Richard Grimes, former Charleston Daily Mail reporter and Capitol bureau chief as well as author of the book Jay Rockefeller, Old Money, New Politics, “[t]here sat Jay Rockefeller, probably the State’s most prestigious governor, with hardly any lights, no phones, no paper, no pencils, no files, no toilets, no coffee and a room-full of furniture he was too big to use.” Grimes, who began covering politics at the State Capitol in 1968, said:[Governor] Moore took most of the furniture and left Rockefeller with odd pieces from surplus that didn’t match. The desk was far too small for Rockefeller. The pictures were stripped from the walls. Moore didn’t even leave a scratch pad for his predecessor. All the file drawers were empty. There weren’t any pencils. Even the light bulbs in the outer offices were unscrewed. It was like someone had taken a ladder and loosened them.Grimes continues:
The governor’s office had a 10-line phone system. But even it was disconnected. Every time Jay wanted to talk to his secretary, he had to get up and walk out of the room. Jay said that he had never felt so isolated in his life. There is an elaborate emergency alert system that sounds off if an unauthorized person enters the corridor leading to the governor’s office. Even that had been disconnected. When some of the Rockefeller staffers tried to plug in a coffee pot, they found that someone had stuffed the outlets, so that an electrician had to be called to clean them out. Female employees complained that the toilets had been stuffed with newspapers, so they overflowed when flushed.The newly appointed Rockefeller staff members even discovered that the ribbons had been removed from the typewriters, and that most desks were completely empty.
. . . .
As Senate Majority Leader in the late 1980s, Byrd pushed for a vote on legislation to overhaul the campaign finance system eight times, more than any other Senate leader. He believes raising money is “the most demeaning thing” he has had to do in his half-century of public service. He says that candidates’ hands are “manacled by the shackles of money.” Recalling his own experiences in campaigns, Byrd states:The current system is rotten, it is putrid, it stinks. The people of this country ought really to know what this system is giving to them and what it is taking from them. This system corrupts political discourse. It makes us slaves, makes us beholden to the almighty dollar rather than be the servants of the people we all aspire to serve. . . . It already costs tens of millions of dollars to run an effective campaign for the Senate in many States. What do we tell a poor kid from the hollows? What do we tell a poor kid from the coal camps? Forget it. Yet, that person may have the capacity and the drive to be a good Senator. A campaign for the Senate will be beyond his or her personal means and beyond the means of friends and associates.Byrd also says had he faced the same challenges that money in politics places on candidates today when he first ran for public office, he would not have been elected to office. He said,
If 55 years ago, when I started out in politics, we had had the current system of funding campaigns, somebody else would be standing at this desk. It wouldn’t be I. I came from the very bottom of the ladder. There were no lower rungs in my ladder. There weren’t any bottom rungs in my ladder. I came out of a coal camp. What did I have? If I might, for a moment, tinker with grammar, ‘I didn’t have nothing,’ as they would say. ‘I ain’t got nothing.’ All I had was myself and my belief in our system. I believed in a system, then, in which a person who didn’t have anything, a person who was poor, a person who came from lowly beginnings but who could pay his filing fee, could run for office. . . . To read Chapter Nine in its entirety, get your copy of "Don't Buy Another Vote. I Won't Pay for a Landslide." today!
