Will Barack Obama become The Billion Dollar Man in the 2012 election?  Chris Cillizza thinks Obama can raise that much money in a re-election bid that will likely be at least as contentious as the Tea Party midterm wave just concluded.  That would only be an increase of about 33% over his non-incumbent bid in 2008:

He raised and spent $750 million in the 2008 campaign, and there is already speculation that the cash-collection operation for his 2012 reelection bid will crest the once-unimaginable sum of $1 billion raised. (That’s a one and nine zeros. Nine!)

“It’s not unrealistic at all, given the amount raised and spent in 2008 and the amount Republican interest groups and 527s will spend against him,” said a former Obama administration official. …

In 2008, Obama raised an eye-popping $745 million, while Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) collected $368 million. Total spending, including third-party candidates, amounted to $1.3 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

That roughly doubled the previous election cycle, which saw about $718 million spent between George Bush and John Kerry.  However, there was a big difference between the two:

The key difference between 2004 and 2008 was that Obama became the first person to opt out of public financing for the general election since the adoption of the current campaign finance system in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

And what did Obama say at the time he announced that decision?   He claimed that the public financing system was “broken,” a fact that Obama only realized after discovering how much money he could raise by opting out of it.  Obama never did anything to fix the system while serving his three-plus years in the US Senate — and he hasn’t lifted a finger to fix it in the last two years as President, either.

That makes opting out a little more difficult this time.   Claiming that he would be victimized by a broken system — especially after raising and spending more money than the entire 2004 cycle all by himself — would be akin to a man asking for clemency as an orphan after murdering both his parents.  Obama will likely blame the Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision in 2012 when he opts out again, but he opted out the first time before Citizens United, and this time he has the advantage of incumbency.  Get ready for another big dose of self-serving hypocrisy when Obama abandons the public-financing system.

Jazz Shaw notes that the issue isn’t the money, but about competitiveness:

This is the natural growth of the election industry (and if we’re being honest, we’ll all admit that it has become just that) and it was bound to get there sooner or later. While managing the communications and message for a congressional campaign this year I was constantly bombarded with solicitations trying to sell us everything from e-mail lists, direct mail lists, TV/radio production studio work and consultant firm services to trivial offerings like bumper stickers and yard signs. We blew through well over a quarter million dollars in just the last eight weeks in a relatively bargain basement media market. (And we still lost.)

To run a competitive race for the White House multiply that by 435 and add in some very pricey markets surrounding every major city.

This is the nature of political speech in the current age. It’s not cheap and the market will charge whatever price can be borne as demand continues to rise.

But let’s also remember that these numbers represent voluntary contributions, not monies forced from people by threat of prosecution or force.  People donate to political candidates because they want to support them, not because bureaucrats redirect their tax dollars for that purpose.  If people don’t like the notion of billion-dollar campaigns, then they can wield the power of their own purses to restrain campaign spending.  It’s always a little odd to me that we’re worrying about the influence of money given voluntarily while ignoring the massive debts incurred by spending money taken involuntarily and borrowed by the truckload.

If we can get a President and a Congress that will stop those problems, a billion-dollar campaign will be a bargain.