Election '08: Last of a kind?

Over 130 million voters cast ballots on November 4.  The turnout of the voting-eligible population reached 61%, its highest since 1968, when the military draft touched lives in every community.  This year's democratic resurgence holds modest promise for involving more people, more of the time, in political life. 

In an interview on the election, Jim Fishkin explained on Radio OpenSource how successful innovations in voter mobilization evidence the capacity for innovation in voter deliberation. 

One possible, immediate step in this direction is the well-framed proposal of a number of leaders in the field of deliberative democracy for a White House Office on Civic Engagement.

The election drove home, as well, the reality that the financing political campaigns will continue to change, perhaps in unexpected ways.  A Gallup poll on popular attitudes towards public financing of the presidential campaigns revealed a reversal of partisans' usual views.  Newfound support for taxpayer-funded elections among Republicans, as well as surprising opposition among Democrats, reflected shifting views of partisan advantage, and belied attachment to any organizing principle for campaign finance.

As Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres have written in the American Prospect, Barack Obama's success shows that ordinary Americans want a system that places them at the very center of campaign finance.

Small donor democracy did not displace fat-cat fundraising in 2008, on either side.  But as the head of the leading business lobby for campaign finance reform, Charles Kolb, said after Election Day, In a joint statement with the campaign finance reform advocate Fred Wertheimber, "Small donations raised on the Internet and magnified by public matching funds can and should be the wave of the future for presidential campaigns and ultimately for all of our elections."

Bill Corbett

Comments

[Eddie Koebke]

Just as long as there is a checks and balance system in place to make sure one organization doesn't send a million $50 checks to support a candidate. We have seen in this last election: a lot of questionable donations from people with ficticious names and nonexistent addresses. Also, how do we know that foreign donations are checked. I believe there is a law in place that says that it is illegal to accept foreign money. Until this is set up properly, I am very wary of this "new way" of receiving campaign contributions. Good idea but ripe for even more corruption.