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Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Public campaign financing is dead
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s fitting in a sense that John McCain may be the most prominent victim of campaign finance idealism — or, depending on one’s point of view, campaign finance folly.
His McCain-Feingold legislation, more properly called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, sought to curtail political speech and to corral the participation of monied interests in the two months prior to the general election.
Now the poor guy’s drowning in a sea of money raised and spent on campaign advertising by his opponent, Barack Obama. Obama’s political commercials are more pervasive than infomercials once were on late-night TV. He’s set new records, having raised well over half a billion dollars and has so much money that he’s able to buy half an hour of national television just before election day to give him a chance to address any concern that seems to be taking hold with voters — like, for example, his relationship with Bill Ayers or whether he is, indeed, trying to buy the election.
Obama, you will recall, first pledged to accept public financing if John McCain did, which would have limited his campaign to about $84 million. McCain, the idealist of “straight-talk express” fame, foolishly did.
Obama has raised $605 million, with $150 million coming in September alone. McCain entered October with about $47 million remaining.
It is true, as we all know, that had the roles been reversed McCain would have been eaten alive by partisan cartoonists, commentators and political reporters goaded by Democrats. That’s because wealth is part of the stereotype affixed to Republicans.
The New York Daily News reported Tuesday on research done by Campaign Media Analysis Group showing that in one week Obama aired 50,000 30-second spots on national, local and cable television. In the battleground state of Florida, Obama aired 1,120 in Miami last week, McCain none.
Without doubt, we are seeing the end of public financing in presidential campaigns. When this election rolls around, the money raised and spent by the Obama campaign will have rolled it into the morgue with Prohibition.
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