The Real Possum declares “Independence” from public financing?

posted at 8:43 am on June 23, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Barack Obama has apparently decided to double down on his public-financing backflip.  On his website, he has now decided to use Independence Day as a theme to cover breaking his pledge to stay within the system that limits both cash and spending in the general election.  Declaring his “Independence from a Broken System”, Obama wants the same people who support public financing in elections to give him all of their money in private donations instead.  No, really:

Barack Obama just announced a major strategic decision — this campaign will not participate in the broken public financing system for the general election.

Our opponents are dedicated to manipulating this broken system to raise as much money as possible — and they’ve proven they are very good at it.

To compete, Barack has decided to keep putting his faith in ordinary people like you giving only what you can afford.

Make your first contribution to Join Barack today, and declare your independence from our broken system.

This would make sense if Obama actually opposed public financing of elections and campaign-finance reform.  Had Obama told his supporters last week that the idea of government-financed elections made little sense in a free society and that his withdrawal would expose that truth, I suspect many people would have agreed with Obama — myself included.  The Watergate-era notion that cash and spending limits would drive undue influence out of elections has never been proven correct.

But that’s not what Obama says.  His missive included explicit support for public financing of election, explicitly presidential elections.   Obama claimed that the specific system was “broken” because of Republican expertise in using 527s, even though Mark Shields pointed out this weekend that Democrats spent three times as much as Republicans on 527s in 2004 and the Democratic advantage in 2008 is two-to-one over the GOP.

Besides, Obama has held office in the Senate for three years.  The system hasn’t changed during that period, and certainly not all throughout 2008 when Obama pledged to aggressively negotiate to keep both party nominees within the public-financing system.  If Obama has discovered it to be broken, when did he make that discovery, and what event led him to that conclusion?  Even more to the point, why hasn’t Obama attempted to fix the problem during his three years in the Senate?

Now Obama wants to generate massive amounts of private donations from supporters of the public-financing system in order to gain a money advantage over an opponent who remains in the public financing system that Obama lionized.  The only “independence” this represents is an independence of Obama from his principles, and that applies to anyone who donates to this effort while supporting public financing.

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