Russ Feingold: Progressives United Against Voter Influence
I don’t really plan on ranting about every piece of junk mail that comes through my mailbox, but this one from Senator Feingold reminds me of how campaign finance reform crashed and burned in the 2008 election. Feingold, of course, is one half of the team that helped bring us McCain-Feingold, an effort McCain is probably sorry he took part in. President Obama, who chose to forego public financing1 and go strictly with private financing—and that with serious issues of avoiding the law’s requirements, pulled in more than twice what McCain was able to get.2
Obama is now angry that the Supreme Court has ruled that voters banding together to help finance their favorite candidates is a free speech issue. Well, he probably knows that his opponent in 2012 isn’t going to be as naive as Senator McCain was. As McCain said in March 2010, “No Republican in his or her right mind is going to agree to public financing. I mean, that’s dead”3. So Obama knows his opponent isn’t going to be hamstrung like McCain was when McCain chose public financing.
Obama himself expects to raise over a billion dollars for his 2012 reelection campaign; given that he raised nearly three quarters of a billion dollars for the 2008 elections4 before he was president, it’s pretty likely he’s going to make it.
Even given the inflation under his watch, that is a lot of money. The only way the average voter can hope to have an influence in a billion-dollar campaign is by banding together with other voters. So it’s more than a bit hypocritical for Obama to complain that the Citizens United ruling “gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington—while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions” as Feingold quotes him saying across the top of this letter.
The “unregulated corporate campaign spending” that Feingold complains caused the 2010 conservative wave came from average Americans banding together into various tea party groups to pool their resources—both money and time.
Feingold’s “reforms” are all about protecting incumbents and reducing the effectiveness of tea-party-like groups of individual voters. He claims that his goal is to “bring transparency and accountability to our elections.” If he’s telling the truth, the place to start is with his own party’s 2008 presidential campaign.
The most awesome part of the letter is the postscript:
This is our opportunity to take a stand and fight back against the special-interest spending that is threatening our democracy. A contribution of any amount before June 30 makes you a Founding Member of Progressives United… please fill out the attached Action Form and return it with your most generous contribution today!
Yes, let’s stop that special-interest spending. Please, give money to my special interest!
In response to Mimsy Election Mailbag: Let’s see which politicians prefer the post office to the Internet, and what they say when they do.
Obama was the first candidate since 1976, when the system was introduced, to forego public financing for the general presidential election.
↑McCain’s total was 368 million, while Obama’s was 745 million.
↑Which is fine with me. Government financing of candidates is one of the most anti-democratic programs we have.
↑Some estimates even put his total over 750 billion; that may include both the primary and the general.
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John McCain
- McCain sees the light: campaign finance reform dead
- Now, will he introduce bills to repeal those laws?
- Open Secrets: Summary data for John McCain
- “Because McCain opted into the public financing system during the general election, he faced an $84 million limit on what he could spend, putting him at a huge disadvantage compared to Obama, who raised $66 million more than that in September alone.”
More campaign finance reform
- Moneyballing election reform: more taxes, less corruption
- American academic: reduce political corruption by creating government campaign fund.
- McCain sees the light: campaign finance reform dead
- Now, will he introduce bills to repeal those laws?
- Obama campaign skirts campaign finance law
- I expected the New York Times to be silent on the illegal donations that the Obama 2008 campaign encourages. I should have known better: they’re trying to cover for the campaign. But the bigger issue is that laws that don’t get enforced are counterproductive; they encourage dishonesty and lawlessness.
More tea parties
- The colorful mirror of the anointed
- The Color of his Presidency can’t change the massive government overreach under his watch.
- A fragile alliance
- The tea party and the Republican party alliance is a fragile one: it requires support on both sides. The media and tea partiers recognize this. Republican party leadership needs to figure it out yesterday.
- Cornering the wild government in California
- Watching the reaction of the cocktail party politicians and big-government leeches to this year’s political rebellion is a lot like watching a wild animal, cornered. The wild animal may yet win, but it’s lashing out randomly and without regard for who it hits. It just wants to get free.
- The continuing left-wing witch-hunt
- Tea partiers support people who think differently than they do.
- I voted against it when I voted for it
- When “yes” and “no” have no meaning, we need to reform how DC does business. They’re creating a system where incumbents don’t have to answer for their votes, because the same vote can mean different things depending on who you talk to.
- One more page with the topic tea parties, and other related pages