What Campaign Finance Reform?

The headline on Huffpost right now is "$52 Million Dollar Man = Underdog". What's interesting to me is the numbers they give on what sort of personal donations are possible. It makes me wonder about the viability of either candidate claiming they are in favor of campaign finance reform.

The numbers you often hear tossed around are that a single donor can give a candidate $2300 during the primary (meaning until the convention) and $2300 during the actual election. This seems like it would help ameliorate the impact of single donors capable of making huge donations without an impact on their bottom line.

What I was unaware of until today is that each person is also allowed to give up to $28500 directly to the political party. That's a huge number, and it makes Obama's fundraising numbers even more significant. It means that individuals can donate over thirty grand to a political party in a single election cycle, which doesn't say much about the reform of campaign finance in this country. This is, of course, on top of free office space and homes for fundraisers and 527 and other 'unaffiliated' groups with no cap on donations.

What this adds up to is that, despite McCain's bluster about how much he wants to reform Campaign Finance, he's taking the same huge dollar donations from a minority of people in order to convince the lower-middle class majority that somehow tax cuts are good for them, and the Democrats love terrorists.

What this means to Obama is less clear, but I also don't think it's great. While it's true that much of his campaign funds come from small-dollar donations, he also takes maximum contributions from many people, and many such people also give big dollars to the Democratic party. The problem, as we have seen with the "Hillraisers" over the last few months, is that once you let someone put thirty grand into the party, they feel they have a right to say what goes on. Frankly, they have a point. They can say: "I donated a hundred times what some of these other people did, my voice should be heard louder than theirs." It's hard to tell those people they're wrong, because the Democrats NEED those donations.

The only real solution is to restrict, much, much more severely, the ability of single people to contribute. Get rid of the 527's and all this other bullshit. Limiting the ability of a single person to effect the outcome of an election with money is not limiting freedom of speech, any more than it is to censor someone from running an ad claiming that John McCain drinks the blood of children. Until we get some of that, we don't have any real campaign finance reform.