"Anybody who stays in the (Presidential Public Finance) system cannot be taken seriously. . . . It's tantamount to waving the white flag and giving up. My own view is there will be a candidate in 2008 who will probably raise $500 million." - ," Joe Trippi, who ran Democrat Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2004, in this story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that says the the 2008 presidential campaign is starting "amid the ruins of the presidential public finance system, which for 30 years has offered candidates public money if they agree to limit their own spending."
Why is the presidential campaign public finance system dead? The newspaper explains it pretty well...
In a world where front-runners can envision a $300 million or $500 million war chest, most strategists think it's suicidal for any candidate to accept the spending limits in the presidential primaries. In 2004, those limits were about $45 million. The limit for spending in the general election was $75 million.
Those ceilings will be adjusted for inflation for 2008. But it's a foregone conclusion that the leading '08 candidates will "opt out" of public financing for the primaries, to spend four or six or eight times the cap. Republican George W. Bush declined public financing for the primaries in 2000 and 2004. And Democrats Dean and John Kerry joined Bush in opting out in the 2004 primaries.
It's also possible that for the first time, one or both major party nominees might decline public financing for the general election in 2008, though the political calculus for that decision is less clear-cut.
The reasons for the system's growing irrelevance are plain: Since public financing was launched in the mid-1970s after the Watergate scandal, campaigns have changed dramatically. The public grants and limits have failed to keep up with what campaigns cost and what candidates can raise privately. The fund-raising capacity of national politicians has soared, thanks to the Internet's emergence as a tool for reaping millions from small donors and to the McCain-Feingold campaign law, which doubled the amount that individual donors can give to federal candidates.
The increasingly "front-loaded" primary calendar also means that candidates need huge sums before the public grants are available in January of the election year.
The invisible primary - the race to money - has been underway for quite awhile now. I, for one, don't mourn the coming demise of the presidential public finance system - it never made sense to me for government to fund political campaigns, or for candidates to willingly agree to limits on speech on their supporters and themselves (through, respectively, limits on how much they can raise and how much they can spend).
I'm much less likely to give to a candidate who hasn't declared he won't take public money for his campaign.
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