Is public campaign financing poised to die as a viable funding option due to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’ raising some $150 million in September alone, while rival GOPer Sen. John McCain will make do with $85 million in public funds?
The LA Time’s Dan Moran argues that it is — and if you had to place (private) money on it, you should bet he’s right:
Barack Obama toyed with the idea of entering the public finance system. He even signed a public pledge that he would work to create public funding should he ever become president.
But with his announcement early Sunday morning that he’d raised more than $150 million just in September alone, Obama may well have killed the system that he claims to support. Some experts now suggest the once powerful idea backed by political reformers will just fade away.
And, as Moran notes, it isn’t just a matter of the amount of money. It’s that times have quickly changed this since the concept became reality:
Its demise would come courtesy of mass fundraising over the Internet — a concept that did not exist back in the Watergate era when the presidential public financing system was created.
By opting out of the government financing system — the freshman Illinois Democrat is the first candidate to do so since its establishment in 1976 — Obama is free to raise and spend unlimited sums.
So, that’s exactly what he’s doing.
While Republican Sen. John McCain is limited to the $84.1 million in public money he agreed to.
“Being awash in funds allows [Obama] to fight in a lot more states without having to make tough choices,” said political scientist Bruce Cain, director of University of California’s center in Washington, D.C.
And the spending will make a difference:
Obama is spending in Republican states and is shelling out huge sums for 30-second TV spots that air in Democratic bastions via national programming, including football games and the baseball play-offs.
The Wall Street crisis appears to have had little effect on Obama’s smalltime donors. He expanded his fundraising base by 632,000 individuals in September to a record total of 3.1 million — most of them in small amounts. Roughly half the $605 million Obama has raised has come from small donors, and nearly all of them give over the Internet.John McCain, meanwhile, accepted the $84.1 million grant from the Federal Election Commission. Even though the Republican National Committee is paying for much of his campaign, McCain increasingly is unable to compete moneywise.
Watch for a good chunk of the money to also help fund an intricate “ground game” on Election Day to get-out-the-vote and protect the security of the votes voters want to cast.
But there is also a downside in this: if Obama loses after having allocated a lot of big bucks, look for some to note that the money didn’t make a lot of difference. There will also be talk about whether news about such a huge amount of money created a backlash. The only problem with that argument if it’s made: there is little evidence that politicians complaining about rivals having more money or — in typical political rhetoric parlance — ‘”buying the election’ has any impact on the way people vote.
Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe has already argued that the Obama campaign needs this money and even more to counter what he calls the “slime” of the negative McCain campaign.
But Moran’s point makes sense: why would any future candidates agree to be limited by public financing now when the Internet can be used to build an army of contributors, who can then be used as a list to recruit soldiers for the ground game? So, in the end, public financing could well become oh, so 20th Century…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.