Mario, the ongoing dialogue on public financing is great. I believe the more we exchange thoughts about clean elections, the better.

Simply put, voluntary public financing is not meant to address individual truthfulness (or lack thereof). Instead, it is meant to address much broader systemic deficiencies in our democracy.

Barry Goldwater grasped the major problem public financing is meant to address when he stated, “Representative government assumes that elections will be controlled by the citizenry at large, not by those who give the most money.”

The qualifying process of voluntary public financing systems is designed to get voters involved in the early stages of a campaign. Candidates must collect a required number of $5 contributions from registered voters in their district to prove they have a baseline of support. It takes candidates away from dark rooms where they call big donors, and instead gets them out in neighborhoods and at back yard barbecues with real voters.

The current system in many jurisdictions places candidates in a quite a quandary. In order to be competitive, candidates are required to raise ever-larger sums of money from those who can afford to contribute to their campaigns. Once elected, the same candidates are asked to forget all about the large campaign contributions from a small pool of interested parties. Instead, we have the naïve and unrealistic expectation that they will think only of their constituents when making public policy decisions.

This is a completely disjointed dynamic - one that has no place in a thriving democracy.

Mario, our democracy requires constant work and vigilance by voters to make sure it is working properly. Clean elections public financing is not designed, to borrow your phrase, “to legislate morality.”

Invariably, some candidates will always be untruthful whether publicly financed or not. But it does provide a solution to the growing problem that has proven to be so corrosive to our democracy: elected officials who are more beholden to their well-heeled campaign contributors than to the voters themselves.
Matt Brix | 09.19.07 - 1:41 pm | #