Obama the Wealthy?

You can find out how much money each political candidate has raised in their campaign by going to the Federal Election Commission website. The Obama campaign has raised more than $450 million vs. McCain's $210 million. There is some debate about the public financing for the presidential election because Obama decided to not take the taxpayer public fund that comes from the $3 you and I check on the income tax return form. He instead raises funds separately, asking individual contributors to give small amounts each. McCain decided to take the public financing fund, which limits his direct spending to around $84 million. McCain needs to rely on the $66 million raised by the Republican National Committee for his campaign agenda. Obama does not need to rely on the Democratic party, which I think makes him more independent and free to choose his campaign style.

The individual donations you can make to the candidates is limited to $2300 for each election. Obama said that the public financing system is broken and he opted for a more democratic way of financing the elections. Although the intent of the public financing system is to ensure each candidate gets to spend the same amount of money for fairness, we know that there are ways to circumvent it so that someone other than the candidate can spend money for campagining on the candidates behalf. Some argue that this leads to nastier and dirtier campagin styles with negative ads toward opponents. I don't agree with the $3 donation on the income tax form because I think we should choose specifically who we want to support and when and how much we want to donate. If it is just $3 and goes equally to every candidate before I even know who the candidates are, then I don't feel justified to check that box. The Obama model is better because nowadays a lot of people in the US have connections to the Internet and have credit cards, which makes it a lot easier for everyone to donate.

If someone donated to support a candidate, that person is likely to vote, so this is also a good way to get people involved. I checked the list of donations for my zip code, and I see only a handful of names. Only a very small percentage of people care enough to actually donate.

Obama has enough cash on hand so he bought some half-hour blocks of primetime TV for his campaign for later this month. I am curious what they will do with that time.