See What You Want To See
The usually excellent Glenn Greenwald has written a very poorly argued tirade against the influence of Wall Street money in national politics.
It’s trivial to use this incident to support the exact opposite of Greenwald’s conclusion. If bankers are complaining that they haven’t gotten anything in exchange for their political contribution to Democrats, then presumably cash donations do not have much influence on politics. (As for Greenwald’s implication that taxpayers are funding bankers’ ill-gotten bonuses, I refer you to Karl Smith.) To see this as evidence that Obama and Congress have been “bought” by Wall Street strikes me as a very twisted perspective.
But really, my intuition is worth approximately nothing here. As is Greenwald’s. Viewed in isolation, this one data point can be fit into radically opposed narratives. It’s easy to see what you want to see if you look at the world anecdote by anecdote. To determine how much money influences politics it really is necessary to approach the question in a much more careful, methodical manner.
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