No longer just candidates: The era of super campaigns

As much as Americans yearn for a shorter, more literate and less bloviated presidential campaign, such a change in American culture will not come soon.

Sen. Barack Obama has stepped away from public funding of his campaign, disappointing some supporters — and maybe the 1-in-10 taxpayers who check off a $3 contribution to campaigns on their returns.

The effort to reduce campaign spending, or place limits on time and contributors, is doomed as long as the campaigns must spend $1 million a day just to operate. No serious presidential candidate would fly commercial coach, just as most presidential campaigns of the 1930s had private railway cars. The equation of power to money is tangible and only the most-intense local campaigns ride a bus.

We have passed the era of the candidate into the realm of the campaign. It was only 30 years ago when a candidate for governor of Illinois walked the length of the Tall State (although local reporters were invited in each hamlet to walk along with him, cameras welcome).

Instead, the efforts to minimize campaign excess comes down to limiting contributors (they got around that one) and identifying contributors (they got around that one, too).

And while the complaints of campaign excesses usually come from opposing parties, the joke is really on the rest of us — as citizens and as contributors. Campaigns need money as owls need the night.

So it was this week when the Democrats beseeched former Sen. Dino Rossi to call off the dogs in the separate radio campaign against Gov. Christine Gregoire. You may have heard them: One ad asks where all the taxes for transportation went since traffic is so bad. These ads, shepherded to the bookkeepers of radio stations by outside organizations, act on behalf of a candidate but not for the candidate.

Democrats demanded Rossi stop the ads, which in reality no candidate can do, other than to denounce the ads as they fly toward voters.

We'll see just as much secondhand advertising from the Democrats as the race wells up from the tar sand of dollars that attach to every close race.

Sen. Obama's late decision to forgo public funding means he walks away from $84.1 million, but he reaches for not much more than that to expand his reach into Republican or swing states. Sen. John McCain has decided to accept public money, reducing his need to find that $84.1 million — maybe because he was going to have a hard time finding it, anyway.

Obama has, in effect, put an end to the public-financing system in favor of the Internet. That places him, along with his Internet predecessor, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, at the front of the next form of electronic selection of candidates.

News reports put Obama's target at roughly a half-billion dollars over the next several months. If he didn't think that was possible, he would not have opted out of the $84 million.

Rather than being cynical about this, voters should be realistic. The spasm of campaign money results not from excessive spending but the long trek to the White House or the governor's mansion.

In reality, our governor's race has been on reload for three years. There is little the governor can do except watch her every move in light of the perpetual campaign against her. And there is little Rossi can do but endlessly travel the state and the country searching for the dollars and the supporters needed to keep filling the river of money.

Some options remain, but they are few. Limiting television advertising would be difficult if not impossible because of court decisions. State and federal campaign-finance laws are tubes of toothpaste, inevitably ready to squirt in the wrong direction when the advisers and the lawyers find ways around limitations, such as the "527" organizations that are trying to bump off Gregoire or the bundling of large, anonymous donors under an umbrella organization.

Don't blame the candidates. They are not fully in charge. They are as much the creatures of the super campaigns as they are the star attractions. The media are to blame, also, for the endless horse-race that fixates us.

What should public financing of a few months of campaigning be? Say, $100 million for each candidate for president? For an Internet colossus such as Obama, that simply wouldn't cut it.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at www.seattletimes.com/edcetera