I Don’t Get It

by Posted on

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/19/politics/p060323D99.DTL

Why is it even mild­ly scan­dalous that Barack Oba­ma said that he’d take pub­lic mon­ey and then decid­ed not to? Are there restric­tions attached to the Pres­i­den­tial Cam­paign Fund that he does­n’t have to abide? Or is it just that it the­o­ret­i­cal­ly looks bad for the oth­er can­di­date to have his hand in the pub­lic cook­ie jar while he doesn’t?

Published by splicer

3 Replies to “I Don’t Get It”

  1. That’s a dis­tor­tion. Oba­ma
    That’s a dis­tor­tion. Oba­ma has been a loud pro­po­nent of lim­it­ing cam­paign spend­ing and an advo­cate of the cam­paign finance pol­i­cy. Last year Oba­ma vowed to “aggres­sive­ly pur­sue an agree­ment with the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee to pre­serve a pub­licly financed gen­er­al elec­tion.” Now that he has dis­cov­ered he can raise more mon­ey with­out the lim­i­ta­tions, he changed his mind. If he does­n’t accept pub­lic mon­ey, he can use as much donat­ed mon­ey as he can get. If he accepts the pub­lic mon­ey he can’t use out­side dol­lars. He’ll be the first pres­i­den­tial can­di­date since the sys­tem was enact­ed in 1976 to aban­don it. The “pub­lic cook­ie jar” is paid for by vol­un­tary dona­tions through the check-off on our IRS forms, not tax dol­lars, BTW.

    I don’t blame him. It gives him a huge advan­tage to have all of George Soros’ mon­ey at his dis­pos­al. (Oh, yeah. He had that any­way, fil­tered through MoveOn.org.)

    Oba­ma blamed this deci­sion on “the smears and attacks from his (McCain’s) allies run­ning so-called 527 groups.” How­ev­er, the only out­side groups run­ning ads so far are those aligned with Oba­ma — and run­ning com­mer­cials against McCain. “Polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy you can believe in.” seems to be his new motto.

    So much for being a straight shoot­er. Turns out he’s just anoth­er frig­gin’ politi­cian. I’m kin­da disappointed. 

    Dad

  2. If he accepts the public

    If he accepts the pub­lic mon­ey he can’t use out­side dollars. 

    This is the part I was missing.

    The “pub­lic cook­ie jar” is paid for by vol­un­tary dona­tions through the check-off on our IRS forms, not tax dol­lars, BTW. 

    Since that $3 vol­un­tary dona­tion is not added to the total one has to pay or sub­tract­ed from the amount one gets as a refund, I don’t see the dif­fer­ence between it and tax dol­lars. It’s still tax, it’s just tax that we get to choose how to allocate.

    1. True enough. (But don’t you
      True enough. (But don’t you wish you could allo­cate the rest?) The dif­fer­ence is that enough INDIVIDUALS want­ed to pay for the cam­paigns to actu­al­ly fund them. Put in check box­es to sup­port the arts, for exam­ple, or farm sub­si­dies, or cor­po­rate wel­fare, or bridges to nowhere, and see how much mon­ey they raise.

      This “cook­ie jar” was put in place to lev­el the play­ing field a lit­tle between the wealthy can­di­dates and the poor­er ones.

      I see any cam­paign finance lim­i­ta­tions as a vio­la­tion of free speech, includ­ing McCain–Feingold.

      Dad

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