Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin dropped by the Big Tent today. Durbin is the champion and co-author with Sen. Arlen Specter of the bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act (S.1285), the bill to create a full public financing system for U.S. Senate races. The average Senate winner spent $9.6 million in 2006, and as Durbin likes to point out, it cost an average of over $7 million to lose a Senate race last cycle.

Durbin spoke to bloggers and other media but I caught him on his way out. I thanked him for his leadership on public financing. True to form, he ignored the praise and spoke of the work to be done. With a hostile Supreme Court on the campaign finance front, Durbin was unfazed. "We still need to do this," he said, regardless of the Court. "I don't think we're sunk, not at all."

With folks like Sen. Ken Salazar saying we need to do something on campaign finance reform, and Durbin and Specter in the lead, 2009 is shaping up to be a big and critical year to move forward in changing how we finance federal elections.

Last night on the sidelines of my weekly softball game, I was talking to a couple of friends about money in politics and the skyrocketing fundraising in the presidential race (one of the friends is a journalist covering the race, so it made some sense, and we had already determined we were going to lose the softball game).

He brought up the notion that all the talk of "the candidate who raises the most money wins" might be misleading, because perhaps it's the most popular candidates who attract the most money--so then they usually win the races, because of popularity, while raising the most money along the way. It's not a crazy argument.

But when you look at the numbers and where the money comes from, you realize that if it is true, it's mostly by luck. Here's the very simple reason why: the vast majority of Americans, 99.75%, never give more than $200 to a candidate, and most give nothing at all.

The Campaign Finance Institute ran the numbers for the presidential race and found that in the first quarter, candidates raised almost all of their money from people giving $1,000 or more. (Here are those percentages for the top three fundraisers on either side, but it's worth looking at the table for yourself: Clinton 86%, Obama 68%, Edwards 77%; Romney 88%, Giuliani 87%, McCain 74%.)

In other words, a popular candidate may end up raising more money, but that "popularity" only matters for that 0.25% of the public who give large donations to campaigns. And while yes, it's possible that this reflects overall popularity among the public, there's no certainty of that: it merely reflects popularity among the major donor class.

This also explodes the notion, which I've seen kicked around a lot lately, that the increase in small donors means a shift in political power away from the large donors. Looking at the CFI chart and the headline, "Big, $1,000+ Donations Supply 79% of Presidential Candidates' Early Money," explains that even if small donations are up, so are large donations, and candidates still spend their time courting big gifts from a relatively small group of wealthy donors. Big money still rules the game.

Which brings me to public financing, a system in which candidates can qualify for public funds for their campaign by showing broad public support in the form of very small donations. They do not have to raise millions upon millions of dollars, even for House and Senate races. Then the popularity and viability of the candidates rests on their ability to build support among a larger constituency, not just those writing the big checks, and it allows them to spend more time talking to all sorts of voters, not just big donors.

The best public financing vehicle in Congress right now is the Durbin-Specter Fair Elections Now Act in the Senate and a great article about it appeared yesterday in the journal "In These Times." It's worth a read.

No need to blow the lid off a commonly understood political fact: Special interests use campaign contributions to pay for access to lawmakers, no matter which party, and they intend to win favorable policy through these "gifts."

It's not "blowing the lid off," it's looking inside and seeing that groups like Big Agriculture are already lining the pockets of prominent Democrats: And what happened with the last farm bill? Among various pork bits were over $1 billion for people who don't farm at all. So it's no wonder that those groups are willing to spend a paltry few million this time around.

The question is what to do about it.

Sen. Hillary Clinton would support public funding for campaigns if elected president. From the WaPo:

That's a remarkable statement coming from the same candidate who shattered early fundraising records. And it's exciting that Clinton, who was the first to forego the presidential public financing system entirely for this cycle, is now bringing the issue back to the headlines with a much more positive outlook for stopping the money chase.

But if she likes the idea so much, Clinton should be taking the obvious--and tangible--step of supporting her colleague Sen. Durbin's Fair Elections Now Act in the Senate, a bill that will enact public financing for Congress.

Last week, Sens. Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) introduced the Fair Elections Now Act in the U.S. Congress to enact a voluntary system of public financing for Senate races.

We'll continue to heap praise on both Durbin and Specter, but it's worth watching and listening to Durbin's speech on the Senate floor last week to appreciate his resolve to fight the corrupting problem of special interest money in campaigns:

You can read the full text of the speech here, or join me after the jump for a few of my favorite selections.

Today Sen. Dick Durbin introduces a landmark bill to bring Maine- and Arizona-style public financing reform to the U.S. Congress. His Fair Elections Now Act, which is often known as "Clean Elections" reform, is a bipartisan bill that would fundamentally change the way elections are run. That's a noble goal: to allow qualifying candidates to run using public funds, forgoing the private money chase that has defined recent campaigns. But it does a whole lot more. One issue that's near and dear to me--indeed, one of the main reasons I came to work on public financing reforms--is global warming.

It's no secret that the oil, coal, and natural gas industries want to minimize global warming-related regulations. Exxon resolutely refuses to acknowledge or even use the phrase "global warming." For decades, these multibillion dollar companies have lobbied against any restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, or pushed to make such measures voluntary. Even as the public has come around to overwhelmingly supporting much tougher measures to curb global warming pollution, we've seen no move from Congress.

The case for public financing is strong; it has been made by Devilstower on DailyKos, by Stoller on MyDD and elsewhere before; and I expect it to continue to gain traction and momentum. Maine, Arizona, and Connecticut have already enacted statewide versions, and Maryland may soon follow. But the fight for Congressional "Fair Elections" is just beginning. If we want it to win in the long run, we need to get behind it now and make sure it's the next major federal reform. Here's the beginning of why.

Start with the recent notion of a candidate as professional fundraiser. The first requirement for a candidate is to see how much money they can raise, which proves whether they're "viable." But there are other ways to measure viability.