Part of my universal, write-in, protest candidacy is to take a swipe at the increasing focus on campaign finance as the dominant election factor, in an era where the opposite should be occuring due to the nominal cost of getting one's message out. When I read about Obama's campaign celebrating the $32.7 million he just raised, or John Edwards supposedly losing momentum because he raised "only" $9 million in the same period, I have to wonder when the law of diminishing returns is going to kick in. We've had stock market bubbles and real estate bubbles, but it looks like now we have a political bubble. With so many candidates raising so much money, not only will a record number of dollars be spent on campaign contributions, but a record number of dollars devoted to losing campaigns will also go down the drain. At what point will the "inevstors" (i.e., the public) pull back, if not to save the country, to avoid the negative yields.
The same media that decries the focus on money in politics are the ones feeding at the advertising trough, so don't expect reform to come from there. By equating money with popularity, the media is also ensuring that the candidates with the most to spend stay in the race long enough to spend it. Edwards' lack of funds is hardly a threat to his strong field presence in Iowa, where elections are won door-to-door, and all indications are he's going to win this primary with his pitch-a-tent strategy. That he won't spend the $50-100 million that the frontrunners in his party can afford will be a tragedy only to those who would sell the airtime, the same media that invented the crisis for his campaign.
In an era of two-way media, expensive propaganda in the form of one-way advertising should lose all influence at the polls. There is nothing stopping any candidate from putting up his own MySpace page, his own blog, and his own YouTube channel, without the aid of interns, staffers, advisors, or anyone else. None of the candidates does this, since they don't think the voters will reward it, but the closest I've seen so far is John Edwards' MySpace Page, which allows users to post comments that are not moderated prior to posting. Any candidate who would allow that level of free speech on his own internet page deserves respect. This is one of the reasons I'm endorsing John Edwards in the Democratic Primary (I'm a registered Republican so I can't vote in that race).
Another very telling sign that the financial shark has been jumped is that several candidates have waived their claim on millions of dollars in federal matching funds, because accepting them would reduce what they could spend on their campaign. If this race stays protracted in both primaries, it's possible we could see the first billion-dollar election in our country, especially if Bloomberg runs as an independent. I do not believe in campaign finance reform, because it is up to the voters to punish overspending. In this election, they may not punish it, but they definitely cannot reward every candidate who is trying to buy their way into office. We've yet to see the internet yield a low-budget candidate, but that may occur in the minor elections that are more easily tilted.
John Edwards' campaign will be a good measure of how well one can compete against the megabucks candidates with a strong message and a reasonable campaign budget. As a result, for now, the hotbed for campaign finance reform is the 2008 Iowa Caucuses. The better Edwards performs in Iowa, the more we can conclude that the influence of campaign money has its limits.
Elections of Interest appears every Friday. Ray Gordon can be reached at LeModernCaveman@aol.com. He urges frustrated voters in any election to vote for him as a write-in candidate.
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