Edwards' Attempt to Clean Things Up

Obama's getting bad coverage this week. The story seems to be how Hillary is running away with it and that the Junior Senator from Illinois may be resorting to some traditional jab-politics.

Reality check time.

But the story that's bothering me this morning is a new proposal by Potsie Edwards. Now he wants to shrink the cap on how much an individual can give to a presidential campaign to $1000 from $2000.

At first glance, this seems like the honorable thing to do. If we reduce the amount of "influence" an individual can inject into a political campaign then we reduce the number of monkeyshines going on. To raise the same amount of money, a candidate has to appeal to twice as many people willing to open up their checkbooks now. We have a bit more of a shared destiny.

On a very high level, I get the logic. It ain't rocket science.

But the question I'd love to ask Edwards is this...They've shown every willingness to restrict the right of individuals to give to campaigns in the name of cleaning up the system. They've been willing to say that money is not speech and that it's perfectly OK to restrict folks' rights to talk about certain things when leading up to an election if we do it in the name of something unquestionably holy like campaign finance reform.

But what if we decided to reform the system from the other end. What if we told candidates that they have the right to put up as many ads as they want until the point at which they become candidates for President. When they do, they will only be allowed to show 2 paid advertisements per week. If they want to get their messages out to people they will have to beef up their internet sites or hold lots more in-person events where they can talk with individuals one at a time and convince them to vote for them.

While my proposal sounds capricious and arbitrary, is there any cosmic significance to a $1000 or $2000 limit on donors? Further, what's so wild about reducing the need for donations as a means to removing money from politics? It's certainly more responsible than keeping demand at a constant (or raising it) while forcing the gathering of funds to feed the beast into more and more creative solutions.

I won't hold my breath.