[PAA-Discuss] FW: Small Donor Democracy

[Lee Loe]

 Excellent article! Truly thoughtprovoking. Lee

-----Original Message-----
From: moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG [mailto:moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG] 
Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 10:13 PM
To: PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: Small Donor Democracy

Can Money Be a Force For Good?

The revolutionary potential of small-donor democracy

MARK SCHMITT |
February 4, 2009
<http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=can_money__be_a_force_for_good>

Early last year, as the 2008 presidential campaign loomed on the horizon,
campaign-finance experts and newspaper editorial boards warned preemptively
of a "billion-dollar election." In a February 2007 editorial, The New York
Times invoked Watergate to warn that such an expensive election would
represent a breakdown of campaign-finance regulation and mark a return to
the corruption of the Nixon era. If Sen.
Hillary Clinton were looking for a clever name for her big fundraisers,
something comparable to George W.
Bush's "Pioneers," she could, the editorial suggested, call them
"Recidivists." (After marveling at the millions that Clinton, Rudy Giuliani,
and a few other candidates had already amassed, news stories at the time
mentioned in passing that there was also a fellow named Barack Obama who had
raised $500,000.)

In the end, more than $1.6 billion was raised for the presidency alone, more
than twice as much as was raised four years earlier. A single candidate --
Barack Obama
-- raised and spent $640 million of that total.
Candidates for the House and Senate spent more than a billion dollars, even
though, as always, most contests were not competitive. All told, the
predicted billion- dollar election actually cost $5.3 billion, according to
the Center for Responsive Politics.

To continue this eyeopening, encouraging, thoughtprovoking article, click
the above site. Lee Loe