Opting Out: Notes on the Federal Elections System

By Danielle Lanzet, VoterWatch Staff

In rejecting the public grant for the general election, Barack Obama became the first major-party candidate to decline the grant since the establishment of the program in 1974. Shortly thereafter, John McCain declared that Obama’s decision goes against the commitment Obama pledged to the American populace to accept a grant totaling more than $84 million from taxpayer funding for the election. According to The Boston Globe:

“McCain’s campaign called Obama ‘just another typical politician who will do and say whatever is most expedient’ and said his ‘reversal of his promise to participate in the public-finance system undermines his call for a new type of politics.’”

In response, Obama claimed that McCain has basically been furthering his general election campaign in concurrence with the Republican National Committee since early spring whereas he [Obama] had yet to secure the Democratic nomination. Moreover, Obama avows that the system not only remains broken but also tolerates the stifling of the voice of the America public by the special interest sphere. Obama’s decision then allows him to continue on with his unprecedented Internet geared fund raising.

Having found remarkable success with funding through his so-called “grassroots movement” involving small personal endowments - often no more than $5 or $10 - Obama has the opportunity to tactically control his campaign stratagem. Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, commented on Obama’s Internet fund raising:

“When you’re looking at the kind of money he can raise now from small donors and your first goal is to win . . . there’s nobody who wouldn’t do this.”

Without a doubt, the cost of winning does not come cheap. A presidential candidate must have money for travel, advertising, etc. In order to raise that large sum of money, the candidate must appeal to the American people. In short, a candidate must sell himself and his platform to acquire further fiscal gain and public standing which ultimately then translates into a vote - or at least that remains the intended outcome.

Following the Watergate disgrace with Richard Nixon, the Federal Election Campaign Act amendments of 1974 sought to do the following: set a spending limit if a candidate accepted government subvention; institute public financial backing for a presidential election; create the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to be the supervisory body. A special report done by the Washington Post on campaign finance explains how the Supreme Court, in the 1976 Buckley V. Valeo decision, maintained that spending money to influence a political election remains constitutionally valid as through the First Amendment; the court also ruled that a presidential candidate could provide an unlimited amount of money to his/her own campaign.

In a discussion with a five-year old child in 2007, Barack Obama said, “We’ve got to make sure that the people who have more money help the people who have less money. If you had a whole pizza and your friend had no pizza, would you give him a slice?” Maybe the American people should simply ask for a piece of the pie.

by billy

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