NYT editorial: One candidate, at least, paused to observe the tastelessness of the money race [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

Editorial
Running for Dollars
Published: April 5, 2007

At least one of the presidential candidates making the first feverish dash of the 2008 fund-raising derby felt obliged to describe the tastelessness of the race. “I’m raising obscene amounts of money,” said Senator Barack Obama, hardly pausing on his way to piling up a first-round total of $25 million.

This is already a record-breaking campaign for the sheer volume of money it is generating. It also is setting a new low with a ludicrously premature handicapping of the race based on the ability to raise cash. It is 19 months before the election, and the quarterly fund-raising data were treated this week like the dawning of poll results from Dixville Notch, N.H.

All this in a race that is supposed to be a different sort of competition — if not of ideas, then at least of personalities and positions.

This is not just another example of picking a winner before a vote is cast. This year, the political industry is spinning the money before it is spent, ordaining mega-fund-raising as the sine qua non of a credible candidacy. Dispatches heralded “the winners of the first presidential fund-raising race,” pronouncing one big $20 million raiser (Mitt Romney) as instantly “formidable” and a “rising force” in the campaign, while discounting a more familiar aspirant (Senator John McCain) as “lackluster” and “anemic” for showing at a mere $12.5 million.

If only voters’ optimism about the nation and the political system could rise in direct proportion to the money stacks.

The one thing established by the private fund-raising binge is that the nation needs the alternative of limited public financing as a rational option for seeking the presidency just as much as when it was enacted in response to the Watergate era of big-money corruption....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/opinion/05thu1.html?hp