Public Financing should be priority number 1A for our party.

[More Than A Feeling]

(I say 1A because number one is the slightly more urgent matter of ending the horror that is the Iraq war.)

For more on this, Zach Roth wrote a great piece on campaign finance reform in the most recent Washington Monthly. It's worth saying, too, that such plans are good politics as well as good policy. It's a bit hard to enact progressive priorities when the campaign system runs on corporate money.(emphasis mine) So, for Democrats, campaign finance reform (not to mention election reform) isn't just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do. It'll be interesting, by the way, to see how far McCain, the one-time campaign finance crusader, can be pushed on all this during the primary.

http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/01/the_2008_electi.html

Read the magazine article he recommends. The Republicans know that continuing the correct system is one of the fundamental bases of their power, yet even so, enough could be picked off in the senate to support breaking a filibuster. The ultimate stroke of genius would be to make lobbyists pay for the system, but even if that weren't possible, I don't see a reason why any American who considers themselves a supporter of democracy wouldn't chip in five bucks or whatever to ensure the future of that democracy, so long as they could see that the money was going where it was supposed to go.

[Solo_in_MD]

1. Yet HRC is declining to go that route

[RufusTFirefly]

2. Whoops!

Hill must not have gotten the memo

Death Knell May Be Near for Public Election Funds

The public financing system for presidential campaigns, a post-Watergate initiative hailed for decades as the best way to rid politics of the corrupting influence of money, may have quietly died over the weekend.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, of New York, became the first candidate since the program began in 1976 to forgo public financing for both the primary and the general election because of the spending limits that come with the federal money. By declaring her confidence that she could raise far more than the roughly $150 million the system would provide for the 2008 presidential primaries and general election, Sen. Clinton makes it difficult for other serious candidates to participate in the system without putting themselves at a significant disadvantage.

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NY Times (via Free Internet Press)