Obama opts out of public financing for campaign

Democrat Barack Obama, a longtime advocate of federal financing of presidential campaigns, announced Thursday that he is forgoing public funds in his White House bid because he thinks the current system has collapsed and puts him at a disadvantage against Republican rival John McCain.

"The public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who've become masters at gaming this broken system," Obama said in a video message sent to supporters and posted on the Internet. "John McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we've already seen that he's not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations."

McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee whose signature legislative accomplishment is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms, responded aggressively while touring flood-ravaged Iowa, accusing Obama of breaking a promise. "This election is about a lot of things, but it's also about trust," McCain said. "He has completely reversed himself and gone back, not on his word to me, but the commitment he made to the American people."

McCain said he would now have to re-evaluate whether to stay in the public system himself but would probably do so.

"This is not a good decision," Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., McCain's chief partner in reforming the current system, said in a statement. "While the current public financing system for the presidential primaries is broken, the system for the general election is not. The entire system must be updated."

But Thomas Mann, a veteran political analyst at the Brookings Institution, said that despite the hammering that Obama is likely to receive for abandoning the public financing system in his presidential campaign, "the benefits ... clearly outweigh the costs." Given that upward of $300 million is likely to be spent on behalf of the McCain campaign by the party and outside groups in addition to $85 million in public financing, Obama "would have been crazy to decide otherwise," Mann said.

Anthony Corrado Jr., a Colby College professor who has written extensively about the federal campaign finance system, said the biggest risk for Obama was to stay in the public system.

"He continues to attract hundreds of thousands of new small donors, and they feel like they have a stake in this election," Corrado said.

Still, John Pitney, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, said, "So he is taking a small hit on integrity in return for a mind-blowing cash advantage. Only an idealist would turn down such a deal, and Obama has now proved that he's no idealist."

Obama's decision to opt out of the public financing system means the Illinois senator, who will accept the Democratic nomination in August, will be the first candidate since Richard Nixon to run a general election presidential campaign entirely on private funds.

It was Nixon's campaign finance abuses that led to congressionally mandated reforms that set up the public financing system for White House campaigns, set limits on individual donations and imposed more public disclosure requirements on campaigns.

McCain, despite his support for campaign finance reforms, has come under fire for some creative uses of the system, including using the public funding he received during the Republican primaries as collateral for a bank loan.

Recently, in interviews with reporters, McCain has also appeared to reverse himself with a hands-off view of attack ads from unaccountable political groups known as 527s, named after the section of the U.S. tax code that governs their activities.

Obama campaign communications chief Robert Gibbs cited a recent McCain interview with the Boston Herald in which the senator said he "can't be a referee" for attack ads of 527 groups. McCain "waved the green flag" to Republican-leaning groups to begin their attacks on Obama, Gibbs said.

Such groups have been a contentious issue in presidential politics ever since 2004, when a 527 group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth aired TV ads accusing Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee that year, of war crimes and questioning whether he was entitled to the combat medals he received as a naval officer during the Vietnam war.

Obama has long supported public financing, but in late February, as he was on the verge of shattering all previous campaign fund raising records — so far, he has received more than $265 million — he began to hint that he might forego public financing in his presidential bid.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/06/20/0620obama.html

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Obama opts out of public financing for campaign