The Washington Times has an interesting editorial today, discussing how McCain-Feingold is impacting the campaign of Senator McCain. A few choice excerpts:
The workings of McCain-Feingold and the Democratic Party’s huge fund-raising advantage have left Mr. McCain debilitatingly dependent on the $85 million in taxpayer financing he received last month. The Politico newspaper reported yesterday that Mr. Obama is outspending the combined McCain campaign/Republican National Committee campaign effort by as much as 8-1, and that probably understates Mr. McCain’s disadvantage.
In the first three weeks of September, Mr. Obama ran 1,342 television commercials in the Washington media market, which includes Northern Virginia, a hotly contested area of a battleground state. By comparison, Mr. McCain ran just eight – an advantage of more than 160-1 in Mr. Obama’s favor. Unsurprisingly, Mr. McCain now finds himself in the embarrassing position of searching for loopholes that would enable him to circumvent the very legislative Frankenstein he created…
…Mr. McCain has apparently developed a very different perspective on the bill he touts as one of his greatest legislative achievements. Reporter Jim McElhatton of The Washington Times wrote in May about the fact that Mr. McCain was appearing at fundraisers across the United States where donors could legally donate up to $70,000 each to help him win the presidency through a group set up jointly by his campaign and the Republican Party.
The editorial gets a few things wrong, such as insinuating that it was McCain-Feingold that first imposed contribution limits (that happened back when disco ruled and the Oakland Raiders were actually good) or making the plainly-wrong statement that the Supreme Court ruled against Wisconsin Right to Life in 2007. But the editorials larger point is sound: Senator McCain has sown "reform" and "anti-corruption" sentiment for the past decade and a half, and is now reaping the result – a campaign hobbled by insufficient funding, limited in its ability to compete with an opponent with a far more sensible perspective on fundraising (at least in practice).
