Should taxpayers fund presidential campaigns?

John McCain and Russ Feingold, at the pinnacle of reform

The Associated Press

John McCain (rear) and Russ Feingold pushed a comprehensive campaign-finance law overhaul. Will GOP frontrunner McCain adhere to the spirit of reform?

Featured Topic | Posted 38 weeks 6 days ago

Should taxpayers fund presidential campaigns?

Politicians make and break promises all the time, but when it comes to campaign-finance reform, it's tough for a champion of reform to suddenly change his mind about accepting spending limits. And it's just as difficult for an upstart challenger to promise to use public financing when he's down in the polls and renege when he's surging.

Such is the dilemma facing John McCain and Barack Obama, who both pledged last year to abide by public financing and spending limits and who now are having second thoughts.

Should the candidates be held to their pledges? Should private contributions be banned? Or should taxpayer dollars fund presidential campaigns at all?

Ben likes: McCain has his cake and eats it too

Katherine Mangu-Ward/Reason

When public funds are used as a guarantee for a loan being taken explicitly so that the candidate can stay out of the public financing system, surely it is time to throw in the towel. The FEC rules, like most of the byzantine campaign-finance-reform legislation that bears McCain's name, just makes more work for clever lawyers, who can always figure out a workaround.

As campaigns get longer and longer and more and more expensive, candidates are reluctant to accept spending caps, which is essentially what public financing amounts to. Public funding has always been a chimera, and, as his campaign's tactics reveal, no one knows that better than John McCain.

Joel likes: The problem of Obama's public financing "pledge"

Jerome Armstrong/MyDD

Obama would be well-served to either fold up his "pledge" or "commitment" or whatever you want to call it, and take a bit of heat now, or else, say he's going to do public financing and be done with it, but trying to finesse the issue only serves up more ammo to McCain for his character attacks on Obama. We all know that swiftboating the credibility of the Democratic nominee's 'word' will be the Republicans' choice of attack, so don't give them ammo.