The Politico ran with a story today, "Reform Allies Defend, Hold Fire on McCain" detailing the response of reform groups to the McCain and Obama candidacies, heavily implying that Common Cause and other reform groups are afraid to criticize McCain and even that we have no credibility in commenting on the presidential race because of our once-close relationship with McCain.

The story ignores that Common Cause has already publicly taken McCain to task: our letter in March explicitly urged McCain to support reforms "both in actions and in words" and stated that "it is clear to us that you need an FEC vote to allow you to withdraw" from the primary public financing system.

And it leaves out the most important question on reform in this election cycle: what will the candidates do to reform our democracy and get big money out of politics if elected?  Indeed, we already addressed this question with two of our reform allies, putting together a comprehensive review of what each candidate (McCain, Obama, Clinton) has done or committed to do if elected.  

Common Cause is far from the only organization bemoaning the focus on questions of "what is [candidate] doing on the campaign trail?" instead of the more important question of "what will [candidate] do in his/her term as President?"  That problem is one of the press in general, on all policy issues, not just democracy reform.  Nevertheless, as we've said time and again, that is the question we ought to ask of the presidential candidates.  For the Politico to leave that out is an error that misses a critical question we've put to McCain, Obama, and Clinton.  Feel free to read our analysis here.