STEVENS POINT – A few days after the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Ed Garvey and I met for a beer at an Irish pub in Madison.

Garvey is one of the funniest people I know, but he wasn’t in a joking mood that spring day, and I wasn’t much for laughing. We might as well have been at a wake — a wake for the American political system as we knew it.

We pretty much predicted the outcome of last week’s election when we met that day. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that boatloads of money poured into elections make a huge difference. After last week’s results, Democrats were bemoaning the absence of foot soldiers in this election. Maybe those foot soldiers just sat it out because they knew they were up against artillery shells lobbed from invisible batteries.