Rolling Out the Dough for the Presidential Campaign

Want to know how to make your vote count in the Presidential campaign? Start buying cookies!

It’s the best thing since Girl Scout cookies: America Chews Entertainment Group Inc. is conducting “America’s most half-baked presidential poll,” through online sales of cookies iced with your favorite candidate’s likeness (real honest-to-goodness cookies, not computer cookies).

Buy a cookie, place your vote.

“Each time you buy a bag of Bush, Gore, Nader, Browne or Buchanan cookies [$19.95 per dozen], your purchase counts as a vote for your candidate. The more cookies you buy featuring a candidate, the more votes your candidate will get,” according to the website, www.americachews.com.

Not a bad idea. Why not bring the truth into the daylight? Votes are bought and paid for in today’s political world. Perhaps the insurance industry would do well to buy a few more cookies if we want to make an impression on the polls.

But money is not the only issue when you’re trying to make your vote count.

“Sure, money helps, but it’s not everything,” said IJ Publisher Mark Wells. “The problem is consumers don’t differentiate between life/health and property/casualty insurers. We need to create one large lobbying body for the insurance industry.”

That is, if there is an insurance industry. “I’m not sure there is one,” said Stanley R. Zax, chairman and president of Zenith National Insurance Corp. in Woodland Hills, Calif. “The so-called insurance industry is not organized compared to other associations; there is no one organization that speaks for the industry.”

Individual lobbying associations such as the Big “I” and the Alliance aren’t cutting it compared to heavy-hitters like the California Trial Lawyers Association, according to Zax.

“Whoever heard of a structure where the marketing arm doesn’t join together with the underwriters?” Zax said. “Labor people and lawyers are structured on a one-dimensional basis; insurers are on a multi-dimensional basis without the involvement of the executive officers or a unified organizational structure. It’s not beneficial or efficient.”

This lack of a united front is what gets us into trouble when initiatives come up. “Because we have no cohesiveness, when we are confronted by initiatives we have to go back and reinvent the wheel every time,” Zax said. In his time as chairman of the Industry Initiatives Campaign in the late ’80s, Zax saw plenty of furor surrounding Prop. 103.

But whatever issues we may have within the industry, we need to “argue out our dirty linen in private,” as Zax put it. Only a united front should be hanging out on the public clothesline.

So whose cookies are insurers buying this year?

In a ranking of industries and their contributions to political parties, insurance came in as the fourth largest donor to the Republican party with a cool $6,720,553. We are the sixth largest contributor to the Democratic Party at $4,309,818.

Insurance may be a conservative industry, but more than that, it’s just plain old political. In the state of California, insurance is the tenth largest donor at $1,360,130. (Totals include contributions from PACs, soft money donors, and individuals giving more than $200 to federal candidates or political parties.)

This information comes from a great little website (www.opensecrets.org) run by the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan, nonprofit research group based in Washington, D.C. The Center conducts computer-based research on campaign finance issues and tracks money’s effect on elections and public policy.

“Whether it’s a candidate or a cookie, aesthetic appeal and trustworthiness of ingredients are paramount,” was the verdict of America Chews. Judging from the cookies’ ingredient list, the contents are far from wholesome and organic, but then, some of the candidates could be said to have a few artificial ingredients as well.

Although Zax holds the dire view there’s “no hope the different factions of the insurance industry will come together,” don’t think that the industry has no sway. We’ve done a good job of influencing our own elected officials, it seems.

By the way, Bush is winning the Cookie Poll (35,747 cookies to Gore’s 28,821).