Matt Yglesias

Bygones

Barack Obama, acting with class and good sense, has been reaching out to John McCain going so far as to host a bipartisan dinner in his honor over the weekend at which he said:

And there are few Americans who understand this need for common purpose and common effort better than John McCain. It is what he has strived for and achieved throughout his life. It is built into the very content of his character.

I could stand here and recite the long list of John’s bipartisan accomplishments. Campaign finance reform. Immigration. The Patients’ Bill of Rights. All those times he has crossed the aisle and risked the ire of his party for the good of his country. And yet, what makes John such a rare and courageous public servant is not the accomplishments themselves, but the true motivation behind them.

I’m all for Obama making this gesture, but personally I don’t believe a word of it. I also don’t believe in saying things about people during the campaign season that you don’t really mean and then taking it all back after the fact. And I think the truest test of John McCain’s character as a public official was his conduct during the 2008 campaign, not his behavior during lower-stakes tests. This blog follows the legal restrictions put in place by McCain’s ill-advised Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act and thus does not comment on the character, qualifications, or fitness for office of electoral candidates but McCain’s substantive legislative achievements are actually hugely unimpressive.

Hoarding the Money

Tom Edsall reports on Democratic Senators sitting on big warchests that could be used in a last-minute election push:

The DSCC’s $11.3 million in receipts from all the Democratic Senators stand in contrast to the $18.6 million raised from the 51 top Democratic House donors to the Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) — 64.6 percent more than from the same number of members of the upper chamber. The total raised from Democratic House members by the DCCC — headed by Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) — $38.8 million, is more than triple the amount raised by the DSCC from Senators.

New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who is not up for election until 2012 and who has $6.68 million cash on hand, gave a total of $115,000 to the DSCC. Indiana’s Evan Bayh, who has $11.3 million on hand and is up in 2010, gave $15,000. Barbara Boxer who has an even $4 million in the bank in preparation for her re-election bid in 2010, donated $30,000.

In fact, if every Democratic Senator who is not up for re-election this year, or who is sure to win on November 4, gave just 10 percent of their cash-on-hand to the DSCC, it would total $10 million for the closing week — a substantial sum for of television time in key target states.

It seems to me that that kind of money could easily be the difference between winning and losing races in Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, etc.

Scandal!

John McCain on Barack Obama’s fundraising success: “I’m saying that history shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal.”

I’m a supporter of full public financing of political campaigns. I can only hope that John McCain’s experience of getting pummeled at fundraising will lead him to join that cause. For years, though, McCain’s been opposed to that kind of far-reaching reform, thinking that the only good kind of campaign finance reform is the kind that’s predicted to give the Republican Party an edge.

Meanwhile, I’m a little bit confused about the prospects for corruption here. In September, Barack Obama raised about $150,000,000. His average donor gave him $86 or 0.0000573 percent of the total. The maximum contribution anyone could have given him was $2,300 which comes out to 0.00092 percent of the total September haul. Someone responsible for 0.00092 percent of Obama’s total warchest doesn’t have any meaningful levers of influence over Obama. The nature of a huge haul from a giant pool of donors is that there’s no real prospect for corruption.

I think you could fairly say that issues of corruption aside, the Obama Method is still troubling insofar as it involves a systematic class bias in favor of politicians who appeal to the kind of people likely to make campaign contributions — i.e., relatively prosperous people. Of course this problem also applies to the way McCain is financing his campaign. The only solution would be full public financing of campaigns. Which would be a good idea. But it’s an idea McCain has long opposed.