After repeated promises during the early part of the primary campaign to accept public financing and the spending limits inherent to that system, Barack Obama today announced that he'll be foregoing public financing in favor of private contributions. The public financing system is designed to reign in spending on presidential campaigns by providing candidates with a match of around $80 million dollars and limiting spending. This was a cornerstone of his campaign in the early-going, part of his promises of a new kind of politics, and a promise that he used against primary opponents who had not agreed to accept public money. On the one hand, this decision was a no-brainer. Raking in the kind of bucks that Obama pulls in, it would have been silly to accept the spending restrictions that would have come with public financing. On the other hand, this makes his earlier promise either a bald-faced lie, or a broken promise, and I'm sick to death of both. There's a lot of spin about the "broken" system of public financing, and about how Obama's small donor network is like public financing, in many ways. Bullshit. That's your first major promise broken, Senator. Any more and you're not going to look very much different from your opponents. Everyone on the big liberal seems to be on the spin machine with this one, but I would expect John McCain (who's been no finance saint himself this season) to be called to account for something like this, and I won't hold Obama to different standards. We need to be better. He needs to be better.
John McCain will be accepting public financing.
Speaking of John McCain, he's now suddenly open to reconsidering oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska, "in light of this changed economic environment". On numerous occassions in the past, as early as the day before he made that statement in Missouri, he and his campaign have strongly oppossed ANWR drilling. For some voters, though, there's nothing more huggable than a few dozen oil platforms, and those folks are McCain's new intended audience. Unsurprisingly, McCain's plan to cut oil prices also involves offshore drilling of every state with oil: a plan which would take about seven years and net us about, at the best, a fairly negligible amount of oil. California is estimated to have about a quarter of the nation's offshore oil resources, and is refusing. Now, act surprised when I point out that McCain leads all Senators and Presidential candidates in contributions from the oil industry.
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