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Obama made exactly the right move today and decided to forgo public financing in the general election and instead rely on the small donor funding model he's successfully constructed in the primary. In response, the Clinton campaign put out this press release:
Wolfson issued the following statement in response to Sen. Obama’s decision to break a pledge he made regarding public financing in the general election:“Senator Obama says words matter. They do. “Last year, Senator Obama pledged to take public financing in the general election if the Republican nominee agreed to do so as well.“Unfortunately, he broke that pledge this week. It now appears that Senator Obama made a promise to the American people that he is not keeping. That’s wrong.“That’s not change you can believe in.”It's a bit of a silly criticism for the Clinton campaign to make, given that they eschewed public financing for a corporate donor model, but whatever, that's politics. It did, however, cause me to Google "Hillary Clinton public financing," and results numbers one and two did a lot to put this particular attack into perspective. Meanwhile, the current public financing system has been dead for some time, putting whichever candidate abides by it at a severe funding disadvantage. It's a virtuous handicap. Killing it is probably a service, particularly when, like Obama, you have something other than corporate money to put forward as an alternative. Indeed, Obama's campaign points the way towards a public financing model along the lines proposed by Mark Schmitt -- a system where you advantage small donors, offering federal matching to contributions under $250, or maybe $500. If you could make a broad-based, small donor strategy as effective as a corporate, big-money strategy, you'd do a lot to bring equilibrium to the forces influencing elections. Politicians, after all, would far prefer funders who don't force them to vote like cretins. It's just that, till now, such strategies haven't really made sense. Obama, through a combination of hiis star power and the internet, has been able to make this approach viable by his lonesome, without federal help. But most politicians won't have his unique advantages, so putting in place structures that help small donors participate in a meaningful way and help politicians who rely on them would make a lot of sense. It would be change you could believe in, to steal a line.
