Money, money, money....

By Libby Spencer

Political oddsmakers are placing their bets on the 08 nominations, looking carefully at who's winning the campaign funding race. Hillary is the hands down winner on that score, reporting $26 million in just first quarter earnings, but all the major candidates are holding their own. Even John Edwards, who I consider to be a long shot candidate, has a tidy $14 million in the bank.

But I look at these numbers and I don't see the winners, I see the big loser -- the American people. The system has gone terribly wrong when the only way to win is to amass huge sums of money. Before it's over, the candidates will have spent hundreds of millions to play the game but the people will cheated out of the opportunity to choose their president based on position and platforms and will once again be limited to the lesser of two evils.

Let's face it, no candidate who has to raise that kind of cash is going to be coming into office without owing some big favors to deep pocket contributors. This is how our government came to be sold to corporate interests over the common good. When lobbyists outnumber politicians inside the beltway, it seems unlikely that legislation will ever be passed that puts the people ahead of the money.

I'm a recent convert to the idea of public financing for elections but I don't see any other way to wrest control of the process from the special interests that currently, for all effective purposes, own our presidents and all our legislators. If we took the money out of the process, then the peoples' voice would carry some weight again and politicians would be forced to run on substantive positions instead of pretty sound bites. Our country would be the better for it.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)