Obama's Negative to Public Financing

On the last entry of Anonymous Liberal, there is an attempt to justify Obama’s negative to use public financing in his forthcoming campaign. The argument presented is roughly that Obama’s fundraising style in the primaries has dismantled the reasons that make public financing compulsory. Obama’s campaign for the Democratic nomination raised a record-breaking amount of money from small donors. His internet-based strategy to raise campaign funds averaged $100 contributions. According to the post, this ensures no substantial influence of the donors on a potential Obama presidency, which was precisely what public financing sought to prevent.

But while it is true that Obama’s fundraising style frees him from some undesirable political pressures, it is far from clear that it frees him from all of them. In a possible political scenario where politicians expect to finance their campaigns by relatively small internet donations, they would still have incentives to define their agendas in accordance with the interest of the potential donors, even if they are not an organized political group. For one thing, this doesn’t seem the healthiest way of doing politics. But for another, it seems likely that the donors, small as they are, won’t represent the whole spectrum of economic classes. $100 may not be a lot of money, but there is a huge number of households in the US that can’t afford to dispense with that money, let alone to donate it to political campaigns. Pace Obama, only public financing would guarantee the right incentives for politicians to do their job correctly.