Money isn't everything.

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: COMMENT - Influence of money in politics

Here's a perspective you don't usually hear about the vast infusions of cash into the political process: So what?

Yes, spending by fat cats and pressure groups, on elections as well as lobbying, at the federal, state, and local levels, is at an all-time high. When people talk about politics these days, they sound like Carl Sagan invoking the cosmos: billions and billions.

Of course, all this spending makes it harder to have a representative democracy, but it does not make it impossible. This is not the time, a la Thoreau's admonition, to practice resignation. Too many of us are defeatist and paralyzed, when we should be indignant and determined.

A protester outside the Wisconsin state Senate, as it was about to increase the flow of dollars into the electoral process, recently declared: "I don't know what it will take to get people to understand: Our government has literally been purchased." But this statement is overblown. Even in Wisconsin, where Republicans have gleefully made unbridled use of their power to crush perceived foes and maximize their partisan advantage, money doesn't always get its way. In fact, it can backfire, as when Republican state Representative Joel Kleefisch was forced to withdraw a bill regarding child support payments after it came to light that one of his campaign donors had helped write it, specifically changing the law to benefit the donor.

A couple of years back, voters in Coralville, Iowa, repudiated an attempt to sway local elections by an outside group affiliated with billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch. "Residents said the group's mailings, phone calls, door-to-door canvassing, and social media ads fueled a backlash as the upper middle-class, Democratic-leaning city of 20,000 residents rallied behind the incumbents," the Associated Press reported.

In Wisconsin, voters in Iron County similarly rebuffed the Koch brothers' attempt to promote an environmentally reckless iron ore mine by labeling a slate of local candidates "anti-mining radicals." The mine also tanked, despite slavish efforts by state Republicans to accommodate it.

In November 2014, voters in four "Red" states--Arkansas, Alaska, Nebraska, and South Dakota--overcame well-funded opposition to pass ballot measures hiking the minimum wage. And an all-out effort by big-money interests to oust progressives from the city council in Richmond, California, failed miserably.

Bob Dylan famously said that money doesn't talk, it swears, and...