Do you get what you pay for?
Here's a little cartoon by Clifford Berryman from 90 years ago. You no doubt recognize the personifications of the USA's pair of ruling parties. "Borah" refers to William Borah of Idaho. It seems he was an intelligent fellow of honest principles who somehow wound up in the U.S. Senate -- sounds implausible, but statistical anomalies do happen once in a while. Well, Borah did a study of how elections were bought and sold and the attendant corruption. As the cartoon shows, those two animal headed deities that run this country weren't able to get their minds around the notion there was anything wrong in that.
We're winding down a 6 Billion Dollar political campaign here in the USA - I hope we all got our money's worth.