Last night, Barack Obama went on "NewsHour" where he was asked by Gwen Ifill to explain his "shift" on campaign finance issues. Obama, who had pledged to participate in the presidential public financing system but subsequently rejected public financing, offered this explanation:
Well, campaign finance, there’s no doubt that that was a shift in recognizing that we could not broker a deal with the Republicans that would prevent the Republican National Committee or the Republican Governors Association or all these other organizations, that are already spending millions of dollars against us, that we could not contain them within a public financing system.
Obama’s latest explanation, in addition to being less than frank (more on this later), marked a stark difference in emphasis from his previous explanation as to why he would drop out the public financing system – that he had created a "a parallel public financing system where the American people decide if they want to support a campaign, they can get on the Internet and finance it."
Of course, the best and most accurate explanation would likely be that it makes no sense to aribitrarily limit how much his campaign can spend communicating with voters and it is nonsensical to think that any candidate is more or less "corruptable" based on whether or not they choose to accept government financing.
Instead, Obama went with a partisan attack, claiming that the RNC, RGA and "other organizations" "could not be contain[ed]." Of course, the Democrats have their own counterparts to the RNC and RGA. But, while Obama has proven to be a superior fundraiser to McCain, the DNC and DGA trail the fundraising sucess of the RNC and RGA, respectively.
So, it does not take a cynic, only a political realist, to recognize that Obama dropped out of the public financing system because it was in his political interest to do so. But he deserves praise, not condemnation, for choosing the financing mechanisms that best allow him to get his message out to the voters. All that remains is for him to invoke usually uplifting rhetoric to highlight the limits of government-financed elections.
