Think about what the civics and history books tell young citizens about democracy and voting, how the members of Congress represent The People in their district, about the Power of One Person in the Voting Booth.
And now, think of this, from the Real World. Every member of Congress has two constituencies. The first has the most people - the citizens of that district: the few who voted for the winner, the few who voted against and the majority who didn't vote at all.
The other constituency, the one not in the schoolbooks, has the most power. The congressperson knows every member. They gave the money for the expensive campaign. And the high cost of modern campaigning means that the congressperson spends a great deal of time with this limited group of people who have the money and motivation - business, political, ideological - to give to campaigns.
There are lots of stories in tracing what money does to politics. Most of the information is on record. It affects just about every aspect of the lives of the people who read your paper or listen to your broadcasts. Since you're a reporter, you should be figuring out what the data means and then telling the stories to your readers and viewers.
So what does it take to get started? You can go to the Federal Election Commission with your FOIA request, pay the fees, load the tapes, convert the data to a form your software can import and start figuring out how to write the queries.
But the National Library on Money & Politics has already done this. You can get more information, in less time, with less trouble. And in many cases it will cost your news organization less than the mileage to the state high school football championship.
The Library already bought all the tapes, with all the data, all the way back to 1979. It can give you information that covers just the states, districts, officials and years you're interested in. You can get the data for just one congressperson now, and after those stories are done, decide to order all the data about the two senators in your state.
The FEC's job is to maintain the records and make them available to the public. The Library's job is help reporters figure out what data they need and get it to them quickly. If reporters need help deciding how to approach the data, or finding the stories in the data, the Library staff can help. They know campaign finance and they've been reporters, too.
The Library gives you information that's not in the FEC records - a coding system that identifies the political/ideological/business interest of the Political Action Committees. The FEC has the PAC's full official name and the sponsor, but many PAC names give you no clue about what their interest is.
Some common requests for data: Send the tables of all the PAC and individual contributions to a congressperson over a certain period. How much money did Senator Z get from energy interests? From the transportation industry? Some questions can be answered with just a fax or a return phone call: How much money have cable industry PACs given since 1980?
You may want to start out with everything for your state since 1979. That would include all the individual contributors in your state who gave to PACs, political parties and presidential candidates; and all the contributions from PACs and individuals to Congressional candidates in your state.
The data is put on floppies in the format you choose: CSV format, a DBF file for Foxpro and dBase, or a Paradox file. We can send it to you Federal Express or, even better and faster, to your Compuserve E-mail.
The National Library on Money & Politics is affiliated with the Center for Responsive Politics. The Library is a non-profit, non-partisan public education service. The offices are at 1320 19th St. NW, Washington, DC 20036. The Library's phone number is (202) 857-0318.