When Barack Obama rejected public financing he revealed two things. One is that he was not about to let a deep and long-held commitment to principle on his part or that of his party stand in the way of political power. The second was that he is the kind of serious player who deserves a shot at the Oval Office. There is nothing illegal or immoral about being a tremendous fund raiser; and as politics is almost as serious as baseball, good management means exploiting every rule of the game.
The result is that Obama is now flooding the airwaves with his message, outspending John McCain at least three to one. Predictably, Obama's critics now accuse him of "buying the White House." Here's Richard Baehr from Real Clear Politics:
Barack Obama is well on his way to buying the Presidency. …The state where the Obama campaign has been carpet bombing the airwaves most vigorously this past weekend was West Virginia. If you watched TV over the weekend in the Mountaineer State, you could not have missed the Obama ads -- an extraordinary buy of $1.2 million per day for 5 days, with ads running in every media market in the state. The McCain campaign, had it spent all of its $84 million for the general election on TV ads, would have had $1.4 million to spend per day for campaign ads for the last two months for all 50 states. Obama has just spent almost that much per day in one state with fewer than 2 million people and but 5 Electoral College votes.
Now Baehr presents a lot of evidence that Obama has played very dirty politics in his previous campaigns, and there is a lot to ponder there. Consider this:
In essence, we do not have a fair fight. Obama has always liked it that way when it comes to his campaigns. Obama said at one point that if the McCain campaign brought "a knife to the fight, we would bring a gun" -- revealing that he did not care about a level playing field . Anyone familiar with his campaign against Alice Palmer in 1996, where he used challenges to nominating petitions to completely eliminate all his challengers in the Democratic primary for the Illinois State Senate, should have realized this aspect of Obama's campaign style.
Those who think that Karl Rove is an evil genius should consider whether "evil" means anything more definite than "Republican." But to say that this isn't a fair fight is nonsense. Obama is raising a lot more money than McCain because he has convinced a lot more people with money to back him. There is nothing the least bit unfair about that. Politics in a Republic is not the same thing as a business market, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a market. It manifestly is a market.
I would note something more. When Obama began his campaign, he was surely one of the least qualified candidates to pursue the presidency in living memory. That didn't stop a large part of the Democratic core from attaching themselves to him. But it precisely that fact that puts an end to questions about his qualifications. In the end, the only qualification for the presidency that matters is winning it. Obama has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that he is as qualified as McCain, or Clinton, or Bush, or Gore, or anyone else who has come close.
Of course, all this means that Republicans were right about campaign finance restrictions, and Democrats wrong. But that will be cold comfort, I suspect, in a couple of weeks.
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