As the political world buzzes about the presidential race, I thought it instructive to take a look at a couple mentions of public financing over the weekend.

The first was a brief mention by Gov. Bill Richardson during the nationally televised Democratic debate on Saturday night.  I saw it (my apologies: I haven't found the clip online yet).  He cited public financing as one of several examples in a list of things needed to bring about change in Washington.  Any time the solution of publicly financed campaigns is mentioned by a major party candidate on national TV, it's a good thing. And I have no doubt that our Iowa campaign and full-page ads in New Hampshire and Iowa (see the Iowa version here) have contributed to putting it on the candidates' minds.

These Democrats are all candidates who have committed in writing to getting a full public financing bill passed; unfortunately, Richardson was the only one to raise it. To me, their not saying it more often in public is in part because we need more courage from our leaders to fight for substantive changes--and not merely highlight the problem, e.g. "Washington is overrun with big money"--and in part because those of us working on this solution need to work a bit harder to demonstrate the broad support for public financing.  Those are my takeaways.  But on the whole, it's terrific to see public financing raised in a national debate.  We're moving in the right direction.

The other notable mention was by our friend Nick Nyhart of Public Campaign, whose op-ed ran in The Oklahoman on a weekend when Mayor Michael Bloomberg was meeting with several high-level political operatives in Oklahoma to explore a presidential bid.  As Nyhart writes,