Long live public financing of elections

In recent days some pundits have started to muse that perhaps public financing for presidential elections has met its demise. They're wrong.

It understandable that why some might think this way. After all, never has more money been spent on a presidential election. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that it will cost some $2.4 billion all told. The Barack Obama campaign alone collected more than $600 million, an unprecendented amount of that total-48%--from donors giving $200 or less.

Obama raised this cash by forgoing the Watergate-era partial presidential public financing program all together. While he came under criticism for doing this, many observers who have worked in the reform world, including myself, noted he opted out of a system that was already out-moded and unworkable, severely in need up updating. And it was President George W. Bush who set the stage for this decision when he first opted out of the presidential public financing system for his primary race in 2000.

A recent USA Today-Gallup poll shows that Obama did not suffer much public fallout for his decision. Nearly two-thirds of the people polled didn't even know whether they had participated or not.

But the same poll also shows that the public's desire to see the system of money and politics overhauled is still strong. Seventy percent of the people polled said that too much money is being spent on presidential campaigns. Forty percent said the nation should maintain a voluntary system of public financing and 32 percent said candidates should be required to participate. And Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to support mandatory public financing-obviously a reaction to the advantage Democrats have mustered in the current elections.

What is needed is to take the energy that has fueled the small donor revolution in Obama's campaign, strengthen it to avoid the need to go to big donors, and make it possible for all campaigns. Obama may have raised nearly half his cash from small donors-but that leaves more than half that that came from big ones. Meanwhile, candidates for the U.S. House raised only 10 percent of their funders from donations of $200 or less through March 31 in the 2008 election cycle. The Senate isn't any better-although it's tougher to get the information because senators don't file their contribution reports electronically. (That's a rant for another day.)

Full public financing systems that are working in the states should serve as the model. Arizona and Maine have had such systems in place since 2000. And in Connecticut this year, 75 percent of the candidates have chosen to participate in the state's fledgling full public financing system.

What will happen after tomorrow's elections? Sen. Obama is a sponsor of a bill to revamp the presidential partial public financing system. Sen. John McCain is not. Obama is also on board a bill that would bring full public financing of elections to Congress. Sen. McCain is not. Of course McCain has famously led campaign finance efforts in the past to get rid of unlimited soft money-the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 is more well known as the "McCain-Feingold bill"-but he's been more lukewarm about strengthening public financing, despite participating in the system this year.

There will be plenty of pressure from political insiders in both parties to do nothing. But there also happens to be plenty going on right now--can you say financial meltdown and mega-government bailouts?--that will continue to illustrate the problem of the too cozy relationship between big donors and policy making. There's a reason both Obama and McCain are both campaigning on the buzz word "change"--the public really wants it. And changing the system of money and politics is part of that.

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