Today the Supreme Court announced its decision, by a 5-4 vote along the court's new and increasingly familiar left-right cleavage, to effectively re-open corporate and union coffers to unlimited pre-election advertising. The cycle of reform and retrenchment in campaign finance regulation, a constant over the past century, is swung round once again to equate money with speech. Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres anticipate the result today in Slate:
Even though the latest Gallup poll shows John McCain to be the favorite of 18 percent of Republicans, compared to 7 percent for Romney, McCain is on the ropes because he isn't raising enough money to keep up. The betting markets say that Romney is twice as likely to win the nomination. John Edwards' standing is also threatened by his relatively low fund-raising totals; he came up with only $14 million in the first quarter compared to Hillary Clinton's record-breaking $25 million. If the Federal Election Commission reports another disappointing performance at the end of this month, the media might declare Edwards a "second tier" candidate and deprive him of a fair chance to plead his case in Iowa by downgrading his press coverage.
It's not surprising that McCain and Edwards are having a particularly tough time raising money from big givers. McCain's advocacy of campaign reform has never been a favorite among top donors, and Edwards' sharp turn to the left isn't a big crowd-pleaser, either, at least when the crowd consists of the small group of Americans who can deliver $2,300 apiece from a bunch a friends or business associates. Our present money primary doesn't even pretend to be consistent with the one person-one vote principles that govern our democracy and in the disconnect between poll numbers and contribution levels, we are beginning to see the distorting consequences. With big primaries pushed into February, candidates need money now to compete effectively. The current setup is a standing invitation for big givers to determine the choices that ordinary voters will be allowed to confront at the polls.
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