If you want to be president, you need yourself a whole lotta cash. Unfortunately for Elizabeth Dole (and the upstanding young girls of Delta Delta Delta), she did not have a whole lotta cash.

Dole claims the campaigns of bigger money GOP candidates like George “dubya” Bush and Steve Forbes have as much as 80 times the cash that she does.

Now, I don’t like Elizabeth Dole. For that matter, I don’t like Forbes or Bush either. In fact, while I’m thinking of it, I also don’t like: Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, Meatloaf, Limp Bizkit, Subway, Wal-Mart, Oprah or any Ayn Rand novel. I mean, who the hell would buy into “The Fountainhead” but greedy bastards who … wait a minute, where the hell am I? Oh yeah, my column.

Anyway, I don’t much care for Liddy, but I think it’s a damn shame that the almighty dollar forced her out of the race. The scary thing is that she was a major player in the presidential race. If even she wasn’t able to scare up enough cash to fund a campaign, how’s any third party candidate supposed to be able to?

It’s obvious that in order to even the playing field we need campaign finance reform — everybody knows this, whether they admit it or not. But not everybody wants the playing field leveled.

Obviously, big-name Democrats and Republicans don’t, but I think even the average Joe might have some reservations. The reason is, we depend on big business even more than the feds to regulate most everything.

We depend on them for most of our quality control — especially in the mass media. This quality control is what forms the “mainstream” of anything.

Take anything — television, books, movies — there are plenty of people who want access to these forms of communication. While no one is explicitly excluded from using them, in order to gain any kind of popular success you must go through the appropriate media moguls.

Whether we realize it or not, this system is what keeps the whackos far, far away. Any crazy-ass Nazi group would love to have its propaganda literature available at every Barnes & Noble in the continental United States. The reason they can’t has more to do with dollars than anything else.

Most of these groups don’t have the kind of money it takes to get published on a large scale. Even if they did, Barnes & Noble wouldn’t carry it because it would piss off their patrons and they would lose business.

Therefore, through the vehicle of capitalism, mainstream thought dominates the culture. Freedom of speech, is to a large degree, an illusion. You can say whatever you want, but if you want people to hear it, you need some money. And if you need some money, you have to tone it down and make whatever it is you have to say pretty non-threatening.

Film and television are the same way. If you want to make a movie or even just advertise on television (at the national level), you’re looking at a huge financial burden. Really, the only place that you can currently be a major player without a whole lotta cash is the Internet.

The reason that people are calling for the government to restrict content on the Internet more than any other media is because big business doesn’t have the power on the net to do it for us. Not yet, anyway.

That same crazy-ass Nazi group I mentioned before has the ability, on the Internet, to make a page that looks as slick as Pepsi or McDonald’s page, and is nearly as accessible.

For many, this makes the Internet the ultimate vehicle for free expression. Not only are you able to post whatever you want, you can make it accessible to any 14-year-old kid with net access.

But as the song goes, nothing lasts forever, even cold November Rain. The freedom of the Internet is becoming more restricted every day by big business. God, I love Guns ‘n’ Roses.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that major search engines are already defining what you can see and what you can’t. Pretty soon, the Internet will be like every other mass media, and all you’ll see will be Coca-Cola and Nike.

And people won’t make too much of a fuss because allowing big business to regulate what we see and what we don’t guarantees us we won’t have to be burdened by any views that might be challenging to a mainstream mentality.

So, it should come as no surprise that our politics are dictated more by who has the most cash than who has the best ideas. That’s why our candidates all appear milky white and as American as apple pie. You have to pimp the mainstream in order to get the cash you need to be heard in politics, film, literature or anything else.

If we really want campaign finance reform, we should first realize that it will mean more diverse and possibly more threatening views receiving equal attention. I’m sure outwardly most people would welcome the change and the new ideas, but deep down I know there’s a little bit of fear.

After all, wouldn’t most of us rather take it easy and trust Coca-Cola?

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Ben Godar is a senior in sociology from Ames. He wishes a speedy recovery to Johnny Cash.