Thanks for the nicely stated thoughts, but I understood the model the same way you describe. My reply can be summed up as: "that model can indeed work as a mode

Thanks for the nicely stated thoughts, but I understood the model the same way you describe. My reply can be summed up as: "that model can indeed work as a model, but it doesn't match reality". That is to say, reality certainly has elements of that model, but it is far from complete. The entire gist of Lawrence Lessig's arguments of late are that we really are not seeing successful politicians simply being those who already love Wall Street and rich corporations. Instead, we are seeing those with some leanings in that direction also being normal people influenced in predictable ways by the system being set up so that most of their time and energy is spent with these biased sets of constituents. In other words, politicians do change their views based on who they talk to and what they learn. And the system just works so that the people they talk to and learn from are almost always representatives of Wall Street and big corporations. In the end, there's certainly both factors happening. Big money goes to elect those who already serve big money's interests, but big money also goes toward being in the place where its message gets heard by whoever is there. There's certainly lots of cases of big money donating to both sides of a two-way race.