Under a public financing system, it's not how much money you can raise--usually from a small group of wealthy contributors--but how many people you can raise money from, in increments of $5 or more. If you reach the threshold of $5 qualifying contributions, you receive public funds. Simple. And then you receive ample funds to run your primary and general election campaigns, plus matching funds--up to a cap--if your opponent raises private money and outspends you. So instead of asking, "How much money can a candidate raise?" (which does measure appeal, no doubt, but to people who can afford to contribute increasingly large sums of money) we would be asking, "How many people contributed because they liked this candidate?"

Fair Elections allows us to define a "viable candidate" by looking at how many people support him/her, and not by how much they can all afford to give. This sort of full public financing system could alter the game of politics as we know it--and move it back to where I think it belongs. Here are a few other benefits:

Allow elected officials to spend the bulk of their time reaching out to constituents, not merely potential donors. Remember, in this day and age, the fundraising season never ends. Just a couple months ago Rep. Rahm Emanuel handed out the $1 million homework assignment to all freshman members of Congress:

That's not the system I want for my elected officials. I want them burdened... with concerns over the war in Iraq, with health care, with education, with the environment. That's more than enough. I don't want them burdened with having to raise money constantly or risk falling behind.

Eliminate the public perception that elected officials are in somebody's pocket. Be it corporations, special interests, or a handful of wealthy individuals, the perception is that many--if not nearly all--of our Congress members owe their seat to some small, wealthy fraction of the population. And most of us don't belong to that fraction. And in a lot of cases, our perceptions seem to be on the mark.

Level the playing field. You don't need to be a millionaire, or know several of them, in order to run for office. Anyone can, and anyone has. Yes, the grassroots/netroots have made an impact in some races and are helping to bring more people into politics via smaller contributions-which is laudable--but that is moving in parallel to the increased recruitment of major donors and the even bigger fish, bundlers who bring in tens of thousands of dollars at a time. More to the point: money is going to be a part of politics, but money shouldn't rule politics. Fair Elections severs the direct link between major donors and the campaigns of elected officials.

****

I'll go into more detail about how the system works in some more posts soon. But before I go, one more big plus in the pro-public financing column: we have seen this system work. The Maine and Arizona examples of functional statewide public financing schemes provide crucial empirical evidence that this is not some pie-in-the-sky concept.

I don't assume that Congress will want to move quickly on this, even though I believe that many of them would privately agree with its principles. And Durbin certainly deserves praise for his leadership. Groups like Common Cause (where I work), other reform organizations, and a growing coalition of other groups continue to push this and to reach out--and the blogosphere will be a critical place both to educate a wide, savvy audience and to mobilize resources so that it becomes a popular cause and, I hope, a question not of "whether to do this" but of "how soon can we get it done?" I'm looking forward to that as we take some big initial steps in the coming weeks.

Cross posted at DailyKos