John McCain has declared that public financing for Presidential contests is dead. And apparently, Bob Bauer hates him for it. Leaving Bauer alone for the moment, we might all take to remember that McCain, whose efforts in the McCain-Feingold aka Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act were directed at resurrecting and supporting campaign finance accepted financing over the summer. McCain tried to make Obama’s refusal of financing a campaign story, but largely failed as election reform wasn’t a high priority issue for most voters (it rarely is). I tend to agree with McCain, and I even cited it after the election as the preeminent reason why he lost:The Biggest Mi$take of Them All
When Obama decided to not take public financing for the campaign, McCain thought he could make himself look good by taking the public financing, while calling Obama a liar for pledging to take the financing, and then deciding not to. I thought back in June that it was a bad idea for McCain to do that, and the resulting chaos of his campaign only confirmed that. Obama raised almost twice as much money in September than McCain was allowed for the entirety of fall campaigning. McCain could have raised as much as Obama, if not more thanks to the GOP’s corporate links, but they didn’t.The mistake looms even larger when you consider the Obama head fake that made the McCain campaign bite on Pennsylvania. Going into October, McCain had just $37 million to spend. Governor Rendell does some interviews with the press in which he said he was worried about how the (Obama) campaign was doing in Pennsylvania. Obama begins pouring money into the state, and McCain follows suit, thinking that the state in which public polling found him down eight to twelve points he might have a chance. He didn’t. McCain ended up losing there when he should have been focusing on Ohio and Florida. He could have done all three at the same time, like Obama did, but he didn’t have the money.
In the Washington Times piece, McCain says that no candidate will ever take financing again. I have to agree. The Obama campaign showed that there are millions of people who will donate money to the campaign, which allowed him to raise $750 million in under a year. That’s three quarters of a billion dollars in essentially nine months. Why would any Presidential candidate take financing with that kind of money to be had. I mean seriously, Obama was advertising in video games. That’s almost too much money.
Now, back to Bauer, who goes off on a largely bitter rant against McCain’s statements:
"The personal dimension to the comment was the familiar one: he had decided to take public funding, lost the election, and therefore demonstrated for all time that public financing was a botched choice. If it was mistake for John McCain to take it, then it would be mistake for all others, at all times, to do the same. He says nothing about reform: about the structural problems with the system that even its proponents concede and have proposed to fix. It did not work for him in 2008: end of a story. He showed, in the most personal of ways, that it is a foolish to accept the money. This is how he feels."
I don’t know who Bauer is. But I can tell he is somewhat delusional. It was a mistake for McCain to take it. If a candidate figures that they can raise more than the $85 million that public financing puts on the table for fall campaigning, and most any major party candidate would be able to do that, then it would be a mistake for them as well. Reform is almost an impossibility. Let’s say that for Obama to take public financing in 2012, he would want an amount of money equal to that which he raised in 2008. The GOP would then get the same money. You would be talking about a $1.5 billion campaign fund, just for the two major party candidates alone. The public would be outraged at such a proposal, it would simply never pass either house of Congress, and even if it did, I am not convinced that any President would sign it, because doing so would mean lifting their opponents to the same tactical field that the incumbent would play from.
Also, I thought this was an ironic bit; Bauer pointed out that McCain never even mentioned any reform options, but then Bauer failed to cite any of his own.
At the end of the day, McCain is right. It is also a chilling thought though. It means that the kind of influence that McCain wanted to keep out of elections just found its way back in…
