And so the farce of our campaign finance system finally ends. We have a system that provides roughly $150 million for presidential candidates. In 2004, George W. Bush spent $270 million. Hillary Clinton is expected to raise almost $500 million. To go public is to unilaterally disarm, accept defeat and call it virtue.
Call it what you want: It's still defeat. I was glad to see Sen. Durbin come out in favor of a serious public financing law a few weeks ago. It's hard to imagine such a sane change happening anytime soon, however. What you could do is reduce the relative power of corporations and PACs. One program currently operating in New York City creates multiplier effects for small-sum donations, making every $100 check worth, say, $500, and creating competitive campaigns relying largely on small, individual donors -- a strategy the rise of the net renders realistic on the presidential level.
For more on this, Zach Roth wrote a great piece on campaign finance reform in the most recent Washington Monthly. It's worth saying, too, that such plans are good politics as well as good policy. It's a bit hard to enact progressive priorities when the campaign system runs on corporate money. So, for Democrats, campaign finance reform (not to mention election reform) isn't just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do. It'll be interesting, by the way, to see how far McCain, the one-time campaign finance crusader, can be pushed on all this during the primary.
