Thanks for Commenting
I'm looking forward to your post damning John McCain for accepting public campaign funds (and then bypassing spending limits by relying on the RNC to spend for him) while Obama took the high road of privately-raised funds.
Dan, I'm not going to argue with you on this point. You hit the nail on the head. There is no way to stop third party expenditures being spent on a campaign without infringing on free speech - something I vehemently oppose. As such, the whole idea of publicly funded campaigns leveling the playing field is baloney. Instead, we end up with candidates like Jerome Block, Jr.
As to Obama taking the high road, you've got to be kidding. He had pledged to go the public funding route until he realized that he could raise more money privately. He advocates "Change" - unless it is in his better interests. If you ask me, that is the problem with Washington today.
A side note... I am not a fan of the campaign finance legislation (McCain-Feingold), which passed a couple of years ago. Like most government regulations, it has had an unintended consequence - there is SIGNIFICANTLY more money being spent on political campaigns today than there was prior to its passage.
A side-side note... Part of the crisis on Wall Street, which no one seems to be giving enough attention, is a result of Sarbanes-Oxley accounting regulation. Again, a misguided regulation forced upon as a result of a couple of crooks at Enron. And, what are we going to do after we bail-out Wall Street? We are going to create more regulation because that has worked so well.
The biggest problem for me with Obama is that he believes more government is going to solve our problems, and I believe nothing could be further from the truth.
One more thing, I really appreciate the sarcastic civility of your comments of late. I mean that sincerely. Thanks for being part of the dialog.
I would never defend either Jerome Block or, for that matter, Ben Ray Lujan, who I consider nearly as awful a candidate as Block. The fact is, as long as the GOP in this state remains completely ineffective and horribly lead, the Dems can and will engage in patronage. You guys really need to step it up, because as we've seen, even outright corruption, exposed and federally prosecuted, hasn't been enough to put the awful candidates the GOP keeps coming up with into office. The "wait until their brand is so tarnished that we win by default" strategy that the NM GOP seems to be copying from the national Dems only works if you can put up a viable alternative.
I agree that individual donations being capped is probably unconstitutional and is certainly pretty stupid but I do like that we've stopped treating corporations as people for the purposes of campaign donations, despite the legal fiction that corporations are people.
However, in states where one party hasn't effectively castrated itself (such as Arizona) public funding of campaigns has been a great success. In NM, someone like Block can run and probably win because the GOP is so ineffective that even his manifest insufficiencies don't overcome the fact that he's not a Republican.
One minor correction about your characterization of Obama's campaign financing pledge: He promised to use public financing if his opponent (McCain) would meet with him and agree to also do it. He set a deadline for McCain to meet with him for the agreement, and McCain refused to meet with him *at all*. At that point, Obama announced that he was opting out of public financing and McCain immediately announced that he was opting in. This kind of gimmick has been pretty consistently used by the McCain campaign throughout the general election cycle - they're obsessed with winning daily news cycles without realizing when its going to cost them in the long term.
McCain could have given himself a major advantage by meeting with Obama and agreeing to use public funding - because Obama excels at individual fundraising while the DNC sucks at it, and the opposite is true of McCain and the RNC. Instead of doing that, McCain chose to win two or three days of good publicity which is now completely faded and will have no effect on the election. His only minor victory was managing to portray it as Obama going back on his word when in fact Obama did exactly what he said he would.
Back to the main topic though: Jerome Block and many other patronage recipients in NM are really awful, and the blame for that lies on the NM Democratic Party, but the sheer incompetence of the NM GOP is their top enabler. The fact that even obviously incompetent candidates can win (Mary Herrera is another great example) says more about the GOP than it does about the Dems.
I've seen lots of words written on conservative blogs about Jerome Block but not one of them mentions his GOP competition. Why is that? Because the
To finish what got cut off: Jerome Block has no GOP competition because the GOP didn't manage to find someone to run against him, even though public funding was available. Even the Green party managed to find a candidate.
Honestly, the fact that the NM GOP is putting up candidates like Darren White, Ed Tinsley, and Steve Pearce is ridiculous. At least CD2 has the excuse of actually being pretty conservative. CD1 and the state as a whole are majority Democratic but the GOP throws up the hardest far-right conservatives they can find and a result are either very likely (White, Tinsley) or certainly (Pearce) going to lose races that they could possibly win with more moderate candidates.
Unfortunately the NM GOP seems to have fallen for the Limbaugh/Hannity routine which consists of saying "the reason conservatives aren't winning elections is that they're not conservative enough."
It seems to me that a large part of this "band Payment" issue should be "Why is JB paying off a county clerk?". The county clerk should be a key part of the investigation , if it ever happens.
Bruce
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