Chip Taylor

The futility of campaign finance reform, Pt 2

From the Washington Post:

Flush with more than $60 million in the bank, the Democratic National Committee has set up a separate campaign operation with its own pollster, television consultants and media buyer to run a full-scale "independent" drive on behalf of Kerry. On Saturday, the first week's TV buy, worth $6 million, starts in 20 battleground states.

Note the "scare quotes" around the word, independent. The implication of course is that the DNC and the Kerry campaign can't really be independent of each other. Whatever. Here's the futility part:

The new spending mechanisms highlight the difficulties of using campaign finance laws to try to reduce the influence of money in politics. As envisaged by Congress, the general presidential election would cost a total of less than $200 million -- $75 million in federal grants to each of the two candidates and $16.2 million in "coordinated" expenditures each by the Democratic and Republican national committees. In practice -- with the courts ruling that independent expenditures are legal, the spending of millions more by the parties on field operations and the planned spending by third-party groups, such as the pro-Democratic America Coming Together and the pro-Republican organizations financed by the pharmaceutical industry -- total presidential spending is likely to exceed $750 million, according to a compilation of party and independent-group estimates. [Emphasis added. -- Ed.]

Heh, heh. Looks like somebody needs to do a little re-envisaging.

UPDATE: Steven Taylor (the real PoliBlogger) elaborates at TCS.