Time rules over us without mercy. Not caring if we're healthy or ill. Hungry or drunk. Russian, American, beings from Mars. It's like a fire, it could either destroy us or it could keep us warm…we live or we die by the clock. We never turn our back on it and we never ever allow ourselves the sin of losing track of time. -- Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland, Cast Away

Candidates are extremely isolated political creatures. The ticker-tape parades and townhall meetings that make the evening news represent a tiny sliver of a candidate's time. In modern politics, the "campaign trail" is a phone line, and the reality tethered to that phone line does not necessarily represent the actual reality lived by the majority of Americans.

As Senator Al Franken described, a candidate's time isn't spent "kissing babies or shaking hands or having serious policy debates." It's spent on the phone, raising money.

A consultant (who desired to remain anonymous) disclosed the maxim of modern campaigns: "I stress they can never do enough call time. Dialing for money is going to be 80 percent of their role as a candidate." Indeed, on many days and in the hardest fought races, 100% of a candidate's time can be devoted to call time. The candidate-as-telemarketer reality is best explained by looking at campaign finance reports.

The notion that federal campaigns can be primarily funded by low-dollar "grassroots" donations is a myth. It's a nice myth, and one that wraps us in the comforting lie that our $5 or $10 or $15 donation may impact the strategic direction of a campaign. Low-dollar donations only matter in the aggregate, when they pool together enough to form a faceless mass of "grassroots donors" who can be bragged about in press releases or whose value is in decreasing the average donation amount (which again, can be bragged about in a press release).

High-dollar donors -- those who can afford to give $1000 to $2400 per cycle -- are the sustenance of all campaigns, even those that self-identify as "grassroots" funded. President Obama, for example, raised the bulk of his record-setting amount from high-dollar donors:

In the general election, Obama got about 34 percent of his individual donations from small donors, people who gave $200 or less, according to a report from the Campaign Finance Institute. Another 23 percent of donations came from people who gave between $201 and $999, and another 42 percent from people who gave $1,000 or more.

John Kerry raised 56% of his 2004 haul from $1000+ donors, and George Bush and John McCain both raised 60% of their warchests from the same donor group. In Senate or House races, candidates rely even more on high dollar donors; it's not unusual for a campaign to take in only 20% or so of its funds from small-dollar donations.

Across the political spectrum, no matter how "grassroots" a campaign may seem, campaigns live or die by the checkbooks of the elite. As such, the entire campaign operation is built around courting this elite donor base.

Call time is the final step in a laborious research and strategy process that would make a private detective blush. Fleets of interns spend hundreds of hours a week conducting donor research or culling through donor lists. They scour for the mundane -- validating contact info and pulling donation history. Fundraising staff looks for patterns (maxes out to female candidates/big Clinton supporter/supports LGBT causes). A call sheet or donor memo is made that can at times look like an FBI dossier -- from wife's name to how many children to special interests. The premise is simple: to land the big fish, the candidate must be provided the widest assortment of bait.

Donor information on the elite is distilled down into that call sheet (a candidate's Bible) and shuffled into the call time room along with hundreds of other call sheets -- names on paper, representing millions of dollars.

The call time room is an island in any given campaign. Within its four walls, a candidate will spend nearly all of his or her days on the trail. Its walls are typically littered with a patchwork of finance data and its tables may house the type of personal effects or items aimed at giving the stranded staff and candidate there some semblance of relief from the chore of courting the elite -- snacks, notes from the real campaign trail, photos of family. The chaos of the campaign and the sea of information cultivated by staff laps at the door, but the room itself is typically filled with the alternating sounds of a number being quietly dialed and then the booming voice of the candidate as he or she launches into their pitch.

They'll go on and make that same pitch, over and over again for hours at a time. Even victory doesn't spare politicians from call time, though it becomes a much more communal exercise:

For many freshmen, most of the fundraising takes place at NRCC and DCCC headquarters. Members describe crowded rooms of metal folding chairs amid cubicles set up to serve as call centers, where the din of fundraising calls makes it hard to think or concentrate...They described days packed with research about potential donors, trips down the block to the boiler-room-style call centers operated by the campaign committees and hours of mind-numbing calls dialed from cramped cubicles...“It’s sort of like a boiler room,” one Frontline House Democrat said. “It’s a sweatshop.”

It's a practice that has given rise to an entire sub-industry of finance consultants or staffers whose sole aim is to crunch the numbers and drain every last max-out check from the data. Like a coach tracking an athlete's performance, these individuals analyze the information and compute everything from how many thousands raised per hour/day/week to how much money is lost via a poor connect rate (voicemails). They train the candidate on the pitch, from tone of voice to the critical "ask" (the moment when a candidate begs for money). The ask is extraordinarily humble and civil and can at times be quite elegant, but it is a plea nonetheless. And high-dollar donors know it.

It is that plea -- so individualized and backed by hours of time and effort -- which gives the steering of the campaign ship to high-dollar donors rather than grassroots supporters. The elite donor base is fully self-aware of its status as the lifeblood of campaigns, which is why they'll use it to their advantage. They'll throw fits if a candidate uses a phrase they don't like or threaten to withhold support entirely because of a policy position. In other words, they do what we may do with our own low-dollar donations. The difference is that candidates are essentially obligated to listen to them for their political survival.

All of this brings us to back to the core issue. The problem with call time isn't the exhaustion of the candidate or the hours worked to eek out a contribution. Politicians cannot complain about the process they willingly embraced through their candidacy. The problem is one of isolation.

Within those four walls of the call time room is a reality that doesn't necessarily reflect the reality endured by ordinary Americans. Elite donors often will obsess about the obscure and suddenly, a niche issue becomes all-consuming for a campaign. Not too many of these potential max-out donors spend their time with the candidate bemoaning declining wages or sky-high unemployment. For those who can afford to fork over a $2400 or $4800 check, the economy is doing pretty well. Candidates cast away in call time for most of their political careers are exposed to a one-sided view of the world: the view of the wealthiest among us. For even the most good-hearted, man-of-the-people politician, the pressure to conform to that view can be overwhelming.

In every campaign office, there is a phone line a sea apart from the call time room at the front desk. It's in the middle of the busiest part of the campaign, with scores of volunteers hustling in and out. The people who call that line aren't usually able to donate what for them would be weeks' worth of pay to attend a fundraiser. They donate their time, their stories, or their words of encouragement. In an ideal world where campaigns are publicly financed, call time would consist of spending some time on that line. Our campaigns -- and our federal policy -- would benefit from that seachange in our political system.