I would love to hear how McCain-Feingold hurt you when it came to "fighting more established political interests".
The inability to throw millions of soft money into the race made it harder to fight the established political interest? Or made it harder to harness established lobbyist interest?
Under McCain-Feingold, candidates can self-fund for any amount, and donations are limited to $2300/head, that's $4600 for married couples. If you can't find 1000 people to support you, you shouldn't be in politics. If you can't find 1000 people to support you but have one guy cutting 10 million dollar checks, you DEFINITELY shouldn't be in politics.
You should read John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty". It makes all my arguments for free political speech for me and in a much more elegant manner.
It is self-evident that if you limit the amount of money that people can spend on advertising their political views that niche candidates and less popular ideas will be hurt the most. Unions can compel donations from their millions of members, your Clintons, Obamas, and McCains of the world get the full support and advertising of the major parties. But offbeat candidates will have their speech capped by McCain-Feingold, unless they are personally rich (Ross Perot).
We had many outside projects (independent advertisements and the like) that couldn't get cash because so many of us had donated our max amount to the campaign (even though few of us were personally rich). There's something weird about being an American and not being allowed to support a candidate because it is against the law. I would much rather have a rough and tumble, wide-open contest in the finest democratic tradition than Democrats and Republicans writing laws about who is allowed to speak.
You seem to want to outlaw outside advertisements because they don't meet your standards for quality. Cool man, cool. I just want you to consider how that position fits within the American liberal tradition.
>" If you can't find 1000 people to support you, you shouldn't be in politics. "
That sounds like an incumbent protection act to me.
We had a few hundred thousand supporters, ended up getting a few million votes! Even found a loophole in McCain-Feingold and set up one venture as a for-profit enterprise (you ever see the "Hillary 2008" t-shirts at airports? Same loophole).
We did okay, considering. But man, I just want my freedom back.
I'm about done here but can you really not see any potential conflicts of interest when you allow those who have the most money to flood the zone with hundred-million dollar ad buys? That doesn't offend any small-d democratic principles that you hold?
I want to re-regulate outside advertisements because they are almost always the product of shady dealings. Citizens United happened this year and we're setting records for the amount of money spent, during a frickin midterm. And guys like you complain about corruption in DC. No sense of irony?
As much as I would like to eliminate the biggest political spenders from the public discourse - the public sector unions who spend hundreds of millions of dollars to elect their own bosses - I believe even they deserve the right to speak.
The inability to throw millions of soft money into the race made it harder to fight the established political interest? Or made it harder to harness established lobbyist interest?
Under McCain-Feingold, candidates can self-fund for any amount, and donations are limited to $2300/head, that's $4600 for married couples. If you can't find 1000 people to support you, you shouldn't be in politics. If you can't find 1000 people to support you but have one guy cutting 10 million dollar checks, you DEFINITELY shouldn't be in politics.