Common Cause Blog :: Public Financing in Democratic Debate

Public Financing in Democratic Debate

By David Fialkov -- Intern
Posted on Tue Jun 05, 2007 at 11:16:23 AM EST

A snippet from Sunday night's Democratic debate:

Joe Biden:...If you want to do away with the interest groups, go to public financing of elections. Let's cut through all this malarkey. (Loud Applause). That is the bottom line. As long as there are massive contributions pouring into the system, you're going to get these earmarks in the middle of the night that have nothing to do with the people's interest. So if you want to [eliminate earmarks], reform the system. Make a public financing system. That will change the earmarks.

This was the only mention of public financing of elections in Sunday night's debate. From the sound of the audience applause, it seems like a popular issue in New Hampshire.

Why don't candidates make more of an issue out of this? Would it be too hard to both advocate public financing while simultaneously seeking big contributions? If you ask me, Joe Biden is a great candidate to do it--but he shouldn't be the only one.

Update from Josh Zaharoff: Al Franken did just that on Huffington Post with a marvelous job of promoting public financing while campaigning.

Tags: public financing, joe biden, election 2008, earmarks, money in politics, clean elections (all tags)

Public Financing in Democratic Debate :: 1 Comment

Our system of government

Talking about public financing, there is a subject that never comes up - our system of government. Our esteemed President has managed to start an illegal war, killed over 500,000 innocent people in Iraq, managed to become Osama's hero because he has become his best recruiting tool by continuing a senseless war which is actually not a war, has lost all of Sourth America, has lost any world reputation as a good neighbor, changed our image to one of being a militaristic government, is on the edge of starting a new cold war with russia, is attempting to install nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe explaining that it is to protect against Iran and North Korea (what hogwash and Putin and everybody else sees right through him), has managed the executive as a dictatorship, treats the population, congress, Common Cause, Win Without War, the presidential candidates, and others as trivial pawns, picks on countries that can't fight back such as Cuba because they are communist and forgetting that our big ally is the biggest communist country in the world (not that a system of government is any of our business anyway), and I could continue on. And what do we all talk about, getting out of Iraq. Surely that's important, however there is a much higher level issue. His presidency has demonstrated very clearly that our system of government has enough holes to sink a battleship. Democracy is based on errors and fixing them, but in this case it requires a major change. The two party system is essentially a monopoly controlled by power bases; not by the most intelligent of possibilities. And because of that the candidates "play not to lose" in their campaigns which means they are not revealing sufficient details about their visions and plans to make them credible. Secondly and most important once a president is in power we have now proven that s/he can do virtually anything (and GB has proven he has the guts combined with a truckload of stupidity to take advantage of this weakness in our system, and knowing that all of us are not of a nature to make waves for fear of being called unpatriotic). We had a world changing revolution in the eighteenth century and it's time we had a second one which one, opens up our election system to more possibilities (and Biden's suggestion might help) and two, protects clearly against a president with a 25 to 30% rating to remain in office to do more damage to the world (and he still has another year and a half to go). He can simply do what he pleases knowing that all of us will do a lot of talking and nothing else. It's amazing to me that there are not throngs of people marching up and down in front of the white house screaming bloody murder. It's time we stop talking about all the surrounding issues, all of which are important, and rediscuss them after getting him and his cronies out of that office as rapidly as possible. God only knows what kind of irrational decision making we have to look forward to unless something major happens, and that takes an influential group and very special respected person to make it happen. We need a new vision starting with renouncing war as an offensive policy of the USA. We can make this kind of revolutionary announcement because we have about 10,000 obscene nuclear missiles ready to go against any threat. Anyone who believes some country is going to attack us simply does not have "all their oars in the water". It's time to organize all of our important influencial organizations and people, and focus on nothing more than getting him and Cheney out of office before saying another word about anything. Keep this in mind folks; there is an axis of evil that is a threat to the world and we should not be bashful about expressing it - George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Osama Bin Laden.

by abouloutian on Wed Jun 06, 2007 at 11:48:54 AM EST

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Public Financing in Democratic Debate

By David Fialkov -- InternPosted on Tue Jun 05, 2007 at 11:16:23 AM EST

By David Fialkov -- Intern
Posted on Tue Jun 05, 2007 at 11:16:23 AM EST