Both the NY Times and the WaPo have stories today chronicling the demise of the 30-year-old public financing system for presidential candidates.  It appears that no candidate - or at least no viable candidate - will opt into the system by accepting public funds and the spending limits that go along with them.

This is not surprising news, but the message is NOT that public financing doesn't work.  We know that no decades-old reform can continue to work without being reformed itself.  So, Congress should get started on clean elections for itself and either extend that to presidential races, or fix the current system to work in the real world of mega-funded campaigns.

As I said, this is not news.  The 1986 quote from a long-forgotten commission that the system has worked well was true then, but the seeds of destruction were already there - the soft money that eventually flooded into the system made the public money nearly irrelevant by the mid-1990s.  It's disappointing that the end of soft money in 2002 was not accompanied by urgently-needed public financing reforms.

Now, we're faced with a billion-dollar-plus presidential campaign, the Supreme Court maybe looking to strike down a part of the McCain-Feingold law, and who knows what new money-gushing "loophole" in 2008?

"How can a poor man stand such times and live?"  Give what you can in small donations to at least partly offset this rich man's game.  And help us fight for clean elections.