Obama's Campaign Finance Machine

Recently, we learned that Obama was able to raise $150 million in September alone and this article by Jeffrey Ressner at Politico describes how a large portion of that money came from California.

In this article from The Atlantic, Joshua Green describes how Obama was able to capitalize on the Silicon Valley and new technology to mobilize the general public in conducting the largest fundraising effort yet in American history.

In a sense, Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat. Goren­berg says he’s still often asked who the biggest fund-raisers are. He replies that it is no longer possible to tell. “Any one of them could wind up being huge,” he says, “because it no longer matters how big a check you can write; it matters how motivated you are to reach out to others.”

There is some irony in the fact that the architect of the most recent campaign-finance law also happens to be the Republican presidential nominee. John McCain likely views all that has happened with considerable trepidation. Contrary to the widespread assumption at the time the McCain-Feingold Act became law (The Atlantic published an article on the legislation titled “The Democratic Party Suicide Bill”), it has not hurt the Democratic Party. Neither has it clearly benefited Republicans; McCain in particular has little to show for it. He raised $15 million in March, only $4 million of it over the Internet. His small-donor base is virtually nonexistent. When challenged about his staunch support for the Iraq War, McCain likes to say that he’d be willing to sacrifice the White House for principle. Nobody asks about campaign-finance reform. But that, and not Iraq, may wind up being the principled stand that does him in.

Interestingly enough, the piece of campaign-finance legislation that paved the way for this new opportunity in political fundraising owes much of its success to McCain. Clearly, he did not foresee the effect it would have on the campaign finance landscape, however, and did not alter his finance strategies in anticipation of the change.