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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (182372)	2/13/2012 8:46:00 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 544147

Looks like Sheldon has turned the money spigot off for Newt. So we won't be hearing much from him on Super Tuesday unless another very rich guy wants him to stay in the race. Which goes to prove once again that money is not "speech like all other speech." Moon Candidate Returns to Earth By ANDREW ROSENTHAL By my count, there are three main arguments in favor of weak campaign finance rules: Money is speech (so it’s unconstitutional to constrain it), money is information (meaning it enables communication with voters, and less money would result in less communication), and money is a signal. By “signal” I mean that a candidate’s ability to raise funds indicates whether he has mass appeal, and allows the electorate to gauge the enthusiasm of his backers. There’s a reasonable debate to be had about the first two claims, but the new super PAC system—whereby individuals can write an unlimited number of checks to groups that back a particular candidate but are theoretically separate from his campaign—has pretty well invalidated the third “signal” argument. The system allows a small number of wealthy donors to bankroll a campaign, propping up a candidate who may not command broad support. We may be seeing this problem play out with Newt Gingrich. The casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his family have contributed a reported $11 million to the super PAC supporting Mr. Gingrich, largely financing the candidate’s anti-Romney ads and contributing to the impression that he’s a viable presidential contender. Now Mr. Adelson has closed the pipeline, forcing a newly cash-starved Mr. Gingrich to hunt for checks in a more traditional way. Trip Gabriel reports in The Times that Mr. Gingrich “will be largely out of sight for part of this week” to attend small-scale events in homes and restaurants in search of $500 to $2,500 contributions. Yet “his prospects of raising the cash he needs are uncertain.” Mr. Gingrich was briefly a hit with small-time donors after his sole primary victory in South Carolina (he raised $2 million through an Internet appeal), but that “momentum has now shifted to [Rick] Santorum.” Republican voters and run-of-the-mill Republican donors aren’t buying what Mr. Gingrich is selling; and I think it’s possible that we’ll come to understand Mr. Gingrich’s not-Romney phase as—at least in part—the artificial product of one man’s irrational enthusiasm. Mr. Adelson is certainly entitled as an American and a casino-owner to throw away heaps of cash for no good reason, but it might be wiser to have a campaign system that doesn’t let him skew a presidential race in the process.