As a sort of follow up to the post from yesterday about the 2012 elections I thought I would address a growing issue in America. Campaign Finance has gotten really out of hand.
The following list is the amount of money raised and spent by the winning candidates of recent elections:
2008: $745m
2004: $880m
2000: $528m
1996: $425m
1992: $330m
1988: $324m
The large amount of money being spent on election campaigns is wasteful and unfair to other candidates (for the purpose of this post we will ignore the inherent issues with a two party system and focus solely on finance of the two major parties). I personally feel that we have ended up with sub-par candidates winning nominations and elections based on how much money they can raise. I have put much thought into this issue over the past few years and will now highlight a few key positions that I think would result in better candidates and better Presidents, in addition to far less wasted money. Note that these are general rules and would have slight tweaks based on whether the candidate was seeking his/her parties nomination or should he/she win that the presidential election.
~No more commercials, period. Candidates no longer address issues in campaign messages, but rather waste millions of raised money on television slots to tell us about how bad Candidate B is because he slept with a hooker while gambling in Vegas and smoked some pot 36 years ago. It is a dramatic waste of money and time and takes focus off of real issues.
~Candidates would be allowed to only spend a small amount of money set aside by the federal government each year. Each candidate would get the same amount. This amount would be determined by using the average cost of airline transport (and guess what, candidates can ride in Coach on commercial flights like normal people). If the incumbent President is seeking re-election he would have his share of the pool re-purposed (likely be donated to a charitable organization). This money would cover travel costs only. Candidates will purchase their own food, their own drinks and their own lodging. Looking historically at candidates of the 2 major parties...they are all fairly well off. They can afford hotel rooms and food. Ideally this would be divided between the party nomination process and the presidential election process.
~Shorten the campaigns. The Iowa Caucuses are held in February. Candidates would be allowed to start formal campaigning 3 months prior to the the date of the Iowa vote.
~Private Fundraising, PAC contributions etc. etc. would be severely limited. Though I have not yet determined an exact amount I would guess something in the $2.5m range. This is more than enough to cover the costs of holding public rallies/town halls/etc. Again, none of this money can be spent on media coverage directly (no newspaper ads, no commercials, no billboards etc.)
~Eliminate matching funds. The pool set aside for each candidate will be all that the government provides.
~Debates will be held on PBS stations across the nation. All candidates will be invited and debate rules will actually be enforced.
This is sort of the short list of ideas. The point of all the thoughts I put forth here is to level the playing field among the candidates of the two parties. It would put the Ron Paul's and the Dennis Kucinich's a fair chance at securing the nomination of their party and/or winning the presidential election. An additional benefit of this system is that it would encourage voters to inform themselves about a candidate by taking. By limiting the publicity that each candidate can buy themselves people would have to work a little bit at learning who the candidates are and which ones stand for what they believe in.
This system, however would only fix one half of the campaign nomination/election system. The media plays a dramatic roll in which candidates get nominated/elected. Cable News in particular can really push a candidate and impact the outcome of an election season. I certainly do not want a return of a revamped Fairness Doctrine I do think that the Equal-Time rule should be extended to include interview time as opposed to just the free airtime it currently accounts for, but this is a topic for another post.