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The Other Campaign Finance Reform
Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic comments on the implications of such a remarkable achievement and trend.
“But if Obama gets 1,000,000 people to contribute $100 dollars for the general election, McCain will be forced to somehow construe that as a bad thing for democracy.”
5 Responses to “The Other Campaign Finance Reform”
[...] Original post by Robert Birming [...]
Wow, thats really impressive.
Paul–
I saw Ambinder's post this morning. Since you are so interested in this issue I wondered what you'd think of it.
It does seem to me that it's hard to construe this as bad for democracy.
Perhaps this is the market solution to the problem of Swift Boating?
I love that 1,000,000 people believe in a candidate enough to make a donation. This is indeed tremendous.
At the same time, if each donation was indeed $100, that naturally brings us to $100 million. That's wayyy too much money. Imagine if the campaign could be run on $20 million dollars and the other 80 million went to fund cancer research, buy solar panels, fund the USO, or supply foodbanks. I'd be even happier with that.
George, This does make me ponder other ways of limiting the disproportionate influence of money on policy.
Perhaps it may be sufficient to hold the line at limiting the amount of money an individual can give a candidate and related organizations. The idea is that the freedom to express oneself would not be limited, but rather the power of a relatively few to drown out the relatively many. There is a reason that our founders did not simply bestow all power in the relatively few land owners.