Thoughts On Campaign Finance Reform

American politics today is a joke. It is awash in partisanship and corporate money. Every election year, instead of ads espousing a candidate’s position on actual issues, we all must suffer through endless attack ads paid for by candidates and special interest groups alike. This year the Supreme Court had a chance to reign in part of this problem and failed miserably.
This is an incredibly serious problem. Multi-billion dollar corporations now have the right to flood us with ads for their choice of candidate. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the electorate were well informed and voted according to a candidate’s stance on important issues. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Politics have become a popularity contest, American Idol: Politics. People vote according to whom they know the best or what party the candidate is in, regardless of the candidate’s stance on issues of import. Hell, I’d argue that most people wouldn’t know an “issue of import” if it bit them on the ass. Candidates don’t even need to talk much about their beliefs, their backgrounds, or what they consider to be important in today’s political world. They just hit the talking points that we’ve all been conditioned to care about: abortion, immigration, taxes, and so on. A candidate’s chances of election hang as much on superficialities—such as whether he wears an American flag lapel pin—as they do on anything the guy’s actually said. It’s pathetic.
I don’t know how we can fix the problem of superficiality in today’s politics. My guess is that ensuring a better education for all would help, but good luck with that. I do believe, however, that enacting stringent campaign finance reform can start things moving in the right direction.
As it stands, politicians must spend large amounts of time and energy raising funds for their campaigns. They’re essentially whores, exchanging the promise of favors in return for money. “You give me X amount of dollars, and I promise to look out for the Elderly Jewish Star Trek Fans of Pensacola Florida!” I suppose that’s all well and good when the benefits are promised to aged geeks, but we start to have serious problems when it’s corporations who are owed the favor. This is how corruption breeds in Washington.
So what do we do? We can’t take the money out of politics, right? I don’t think we have to. All we have to do is make contributions to specific candidates illegal. I say we allow people and corporations to donate however much they want, but it must all go into one large pot, to be divided up equally among the candidates. In this way, we have no politician beholden to anyone. At least not due to the campaign process.
I’m unsure on the specifics of this; I’m no expert when it comes to this area. But why can’t it work? I suppose there are at least a couple of ways it could be done. One, all money is contributed to the same large pot, and then divided up among the states and candidates according to population statistics and so on. Or each state or district could have its own fund to be divided equally among the candidates.
And in an effort to educate the electorate and get them focused on what matters, a ban on third party ads should also be enacted. I don’t care what the “Committee For Killing Commies” has to say about the candidates. If we have to endure political ads on TV, let them be solely from the candidates involved. We could even go so far as to ban TV ads altogether and instead allow for specific times for candidates to publicly debate the issues at hand. I’d say campaign money would be much better spent on a series of debates—that include third party candidates, mind you—than on endless attack ads that are generally misleading and beside the point.
What do you think about this idea? That’s not rhetorical; I really want to know. Obviously there’d be a lot of kinks to work out, but I think that this would go a long way towards cleaning up American politics. It could even have the added benefit of allowing third party candidates to get their message out and break the monopoly the Democrats and Republicans have on our political system. Yes, I’m sure there are flaws in this plan (if you can call something so basic a plan), but I think it’s better than the current system. Special interests would still be allowed to delude the masses through mailing leaflets and such, so no whining about the First Amendment (corporations shouldn’t be included in the First Amendment anyway). They could spend their money on reams of lies and misinformation, and hopefully these lies would be relegated to the trash where they belong.