John McCain, along with Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, has been a champion of Campaign Finance Reform. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as McCain-Feingold for its sponsors, was the first major overhaul of campaign finance laws in almost 30 years.
In 2007 Barack Obama and John McCain both promised to accept public financing if the other party's nominee did. McCain, being a man of honor (how's that working out for you John?), stuck to that promise. Obama deceived the public and broke that promise.
It's easy to see why Obama makes himself out to be a liar; once he realized how much money it would take to defeat more qualified candidates, he had no real choice but to accept the money. Due to the limitations on spending from public financing, Obama is outspending McCain by about 7-1. He promises to outspend McCain as president by an even higher number. Can you say higher taxes everyone, despite another soon to be broken promise by Obama.
Did McCain make a mistake by sticking to his promise and following up on his beliefs that campaign finance ought to be a fair fight. It's possible that it might cost him the election, but not his integrity. This is something that he believed strongly in and has fought for, once again against his own party's wishes, and he stayed true to himself.
What about all this money that the Obama campaign has collected? Is it all legal? Probably not. In this day of Internet donations, prepaid debit/credit cards and an unwillingness to verify the validity of these donations by his campaign, too much opportunity exists for illegal money to be flowing in. The campaign is fond of saying that many of its contributions come from millions of small donors, but what it doesn't say is that a greater percentage of funds are coming from those contributing more than $200. Obama will also have received more than twice as many contributions of over $1,000 than any candidate in history.
What are they doing with all that money? Spending more money on negative campaigning than any candidate in history.
With an ad spending disparity of 7 - 1 and an opposition party incumbent in the White House with an extremely low opinion rating, why is it that polls show Obama with leads of only 2%-11%? Frequency of message is extremely important in selling something and Obama has a clear advantage. The answer lies in the fact that the product and the message are not strong enough and without the extraordinary amounts of cash, Obama would stand no chance.
What will be the future of campaign finance reform? There will still be a few attempts to fix it, but since Democrats were the ones screaming for it before and one of their own showed everybody what could be accomplished with private money, it will mostly disappear. Obama has caused me to change my mind on one thing; I am now in favor of eliminating the public financing route and applaud Americans for supporting their political beliefs with their dollars. The one thing that will be needed is to make certain that we can have more checks in place to keep out the corruption.