After this year’s presidential campaign — in which Barack Obama first shunned public financing and then eclipsed virtually any campaign finance record you can measure — the "reform" community is pushing for the new President and Congress to "fix" the system.
But, as the Washington Times reported Monday, changing the rules of the campaign finance game now might not be such a popular agenda on Capitol Hill or in the White House since the incoming powers-that-be did pretty darn well with the system that’s already in place.
"The Democratic leadership may decide Obama is better off without an overhaul of the public financing system," Michael Toner, a former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told the Times. "These electoral calculations are never far from anybody’s mind," he explained.
Really? Politicians putting their own interest in getting re-elected and retaining political power ahead of principle when it comes to legislation? Say it ain’t so.
Of course there are any number of other reasons why the new administration should not, and probably cannot, spend time and effort – not to mention money – on the federal public financing system come January.
Not the least of these reasons is that President-elect Obama’s tremendous fundraising success has shown just how great the taxpayer investment would need to be in order to convince future candidates to accept public financing and the spending limits that go with it.
All told, campaign finance reports submitted through last week show that the Obama campaign raised roughly $750 million, racing past the combined Bush-Kerry fundraising total from just four years earlier by nearly $100 million.
Indeed, during the last month of his campaign alone, President-elect Obama raised more than $110 million. To put that in perspective, from October 16 through November 24 (20 days after the election), the Obama campaign raised more than $25 million more than the entire amount of public financing Senator John McCain received for the whole general election ($84 million).
Needless to say, Massie Rich of the Center for Responsive Politics hit the nail on the head when she told the Times: "In this day and age, $84 million isn’t enough for a presidential campaign."
Luckily, as the Obama campaign amply demonstrated, there is no good reason the American taxpayers need to continue to be on the hook for presidential campaigns. And, because they won, the new President and Congress may be thinking just that.
