Thursday, June 19, 2008
Obama's Not taking Campaign financing
I am so impressed with Obama. I don't really understand much about campaign finance and am confused as to why he is getting paned in the conservative media for not accepting this funding. Several quotes suggested that he was lying somehow to the American people for choosing not to accept the money. I just don't get how this is not a positive step. I think he makes an eloquent point, and is brave to be taking action now, while he is running and vulnerable.
I am getting more and more excited about Obama and have even searched through the campaign swag site to try to find a teeshirt that I like, or a bumper magnet. However, all of the tee-shirts are on backorder. I'm sorta hoping he'll pick Al for vice, although I rather doubt Al is going to be down with being vice again. Here's hoping.
But it is exciting to actually be excited about a presidential candidate. Although I have grown to adore Al I was indifferent to him when he ran before. Since watching his movie (several times, I find it riveting) I wonder if he wasn't better served in the long run to make a bigger, more pointed splash about the environment by not winning the (court's decision of the outcome of the) election.
I just watched that new Kevin Spacey movie "Recount" recently and am still dubious about the shenanigans that went on there. Really, I still adamantly disagree with the electoral collage. However, as proved by the 2000 elections, and the more recent primary voting failures, we need to work on the voting system. Also, I very much agree that people should follow rules that were set before the elections... and after watching "Recount" understand that the rules had to be followed, despite the horrible after effects and stupidity.
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3 comments:
Well he put an amusing twist on it at least.
The way public financing for presidential campaigns works is that the candidate has to either opt-in or opt-out. If they opt-in, they get a set amount and cannot spend more than that amount. If they opt-out, they are on their own to raise money, but have no spending limit.
The law has been taken advantage of by both parties since it's inception. In the current race, the parties are doing the following:
Obama, who is raising insane amounts of cash (with a high percentage coming in small donations from voters themselves), is going to opt-out because he frankly will make more raising it himself. If you can make more than the government gives you, it makes sense not to be limited.
McCain isn't raising so much (last I saw, less than 40% as much), and his name happens to be on the law that sets up the public system (he co-wrote it in 2003), so he is pretty much forced to accept public money and the limits it sets. The republicans just aren't as fired up as the democrats when it comes to donating this year.
The idea of the finance system was to put both candidates on equal footing by letting them have the same amount of money and limiting their overall spending. The problem is that the caps are too low, so really successful candidates (like Obama and Bush) pretty much have to opt-out.
The republicans will do their best to paint McCain as the underdog because he has less money. They will semi-plausibly claim that Obama is trying to win by simply outspending him. Also, I think Obama might have promised to opt-in at some point in the past, although I'm not sure on that, and in politics people get pissed if you change your mind on anything.
The 527 groups are political action groups. They are subject to a bunch of rules, but crucially, they don't have limits on how much they can spend to support a candidate. So both sides use them heavily to get around campaign finance limits. Examples include moveon.org and the swift boat veterans of 2004, but there are hundreds and they spend hundreds of millions of dollars every election.
Obama is basically accusing McCain of accepting public money and limits (so that he can appear to be the "little guy"), and then funnelling his donor's money into 527 groups that don't have any limits. This is mostly true, but highly ironic, because it was the Democrats that really created the 527 group strategy in 2004 (moveon.org, a democrat 527 group, was and remains huge). McCain is simply taking a play out of their playbook from the last election.
That was very informative Drew, thanks! I feel my brain doubling in size.
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