Comments on: Privatization of Campaign Financing

By: Soccer Dad

Soccer Dad — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:43:30 +0000

If ... you must 01/24/2007... If you haven't read How a rumor and a song brought down a dynasty at Secular Blasphemy; you must. If you haven't read Another Mass Murderer in the Guardian's Pantheon by Simply Jews; you must. If you haven't read Outside the Beltway's Scientists a...

By: M. Murcek

M. Murcek — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:15:19 +0000

More money is spent every year in America on porn, or snack foods, for that matter, than is spent in these "expensive" election campaigns

By: clarice

clarice — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:48:34 +0000

Why should we be financing Sharpton and Kucinisc's campaigns..frankly it looks to me like a swell way for certain to lose candidates to get a lot of free trips and publicity.
Anyway I'm looking forward again to those 40 person Dem primary "debates" where we learn little more about the candidates than their names.

By: MSS

MSS — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:47:12 +0000

Why should Republicans have to fund Hillary Clinton’s campaign or Democrats Mitt Romney’s?

Simple. Because democracy is something that unites us, not divides us. We are all in this together, and only if campaigns are publicly funded--ideally totally so, not just with the broken system of public matching funds--can we ever have parties and candidates that we know are working for US and not for the richest few.

I am enough of a realist to recognize that total public financing may not be practical, or even desirable. But it is the ideal against which campaign-finance systems should be measured. And ours has come up short for a long time, and it is sinking lower into the muck all the time.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:47:27 +0000

Who is it that has hailed the system, exactly? Not the American people, who overwhelmingly refused to check the box on their taxes allocating $1 to the fund

My guess is that most people don't really understand what the $3 is for.

We should not conclude that people don't support the idea of public funding from their refusal to check the box.

By: PoliBlog ™: A Rough Draft of my Thoughts » The Death of the Current Campaign Finance System?

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:40:54 +0000

[...] James Joyner also comments on the story and rightly notes that hand-wringing over the amount of money spend in presidential campaigns is misplaced. Filed under: US Politics, Campaign Finance Reform, 2008 Campaign | |Send TrackBack [...]

By: Anderson

Anderson — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:22:31 +0000

I hope OTB readers will be jumping up to praise HRC for saving the public millions of dollars.

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:45:24 +0000

If I had my druthers, James, I'd make it illegal for television stations to accept money for political advertising. Not ban it. Illegal to sell it: clearly within Congress's powers under present interpretations of the commerce clause. I believe it's the cost of television advertising that's driving political spending up. The other problem is the value measured in power and money of political office. But that's a lot harder to deal with.