What Makes Somone Do This?

I have to wonder what motivates someone like Katherine Harris.

People paying for their own political campaigns is not a new story, but usually those who do it have more money than they know what to do with. We can debate at another time the merits of a billionaire "buying" a race by spending a small fraction of his or her vast holdings. On the one hand, it gives them an unfair advantage, but on the other hand it frees them from being beholden to donors.

However, Katherine Harris is facing a huge uphill battle. She's in a race for a Senate seat in which she is trailing by 20 percentage points behind her main rival (48% to 28%). Her solution? She has just announced that she's sinking her entire personal fortune of $10 million (largely comprised of money she recently inherited from her father) into this campaign.

What can she possibly be thinking? This isn't a woman who has hundreds of millions of additional dollars. This is a woman who will have NOTHING if she loses this campaign. But it's not even a gamble, because she'll have NOTHING if she *WINS* the campaign except a Senate seat at a salary which (last I checked) is somewhere around $150,000/year. At that rate, she'll have to hold the job for almost 70 years in order to earn back the money she spent to get the seat.

And of course that all assumes that $10 million will be enough to overcome such a huge deficit in popularity.

The sad part about the whole story is to listen to her speak, she seems to have delusions of grandeur. On the day she announced her candidacy she called it a historic day because a woman was beginning a Senate campaign. She talks as though she has a groundswell of support that's going to sweep her into a Senate seat and then wash across the country, righting wrongs and fighting evil, and unlike the rhetoric of more polished politicians, she seems honestly to believe it's true.

I simply can't understand what there is about a seat on the Senate which is worth spending that much money for, when it's all you have.

Liam.