Footing the Bill

Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush before her, are making it exceedingly difficult for the Franchise to remain fair in this country. Clinton and Bush in the same sentence (the same vein even!) you say with stunned indignation? You betcha.
Today's major dailies ran pieces on the imminent demise of public campaign finance. Everyone gives Good Reasons for this, of course, that range from escalating campaign costs to undue restrictions written into a law resulting from the Watergate fuckshow. Ah, well, harsh perhaps but the memory of that episode still whacks at the exposed nerve of the American Dream. Public campaign finance law was crafted to lend a degree of transparency to the scene; shine a brilliant Klieg lamp on who was writing the checks. If this were an imperfect world, those folks that gave more treasure than most may just very well expect something in return... Shocking.
But that's all just speculation, right? Quid pro quo is practically Greek in the District of Columbia. Well, some folks thought there might be a sliver of meaning and relevance to that old phrase and wanted to inject a little preventative Truth and Culpability into the Beltway's main artery. If the People knowingly (duty, patriots, duty!) allocated a portion of their tax money (not their returns!) to the Government to finance campaigns, we'd have no need for individual contributors to cut checks. This would then necessarily limit all candidates to a certain purse bulk. There would be a semblance of that fabled level playing ground, where candidates would be judged on the merits, not on their ability to slather every surface with adverts for themselves, but (if 2004 was any measure) mostly against their opponent(s).
According to several articles today, W. was the first to use a loophole to opt out of public financing for primaries. This allowed him to raise as much as he damn well pleased from whomever he chose. Influence graced the memo portion of some checks as not-so-veiled pleas for protection of the American Dream through increased financing of Oil interests... Or maybe not. But let's not revisit those kinds of ugly truths at this moment.
Hillary is not one of my favorite people. I find her to be an opportunist and a phoney. She has now expanded the disregard for Public Campaign Financing to include what must seem to her alone as her inevitable General Election contest. That horse is not even being brought out of the stable yet and may prove to be lame, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. The point is that Sen. Clinton is running up the standard of disrespect for a federal mechanism that could help end the reign of influence peddling in D.C. And what of the fact that the staggering amount of money, oft told Hundreds of Millions, spent on TV and the rest could be far better spent. Well that's a subject for a different time.
W. and Hillary are both players in the same ruthless game and feel that if they don't follow the current rules they will be Irrelevant, which is true. That is until someone with Power and Influence says No to this machine that threatens to permanently eviscerate any notion that the People elect the President.