Fronted Runners

Let's screw up the Presidential $election process altogether, she says:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 — The public financing system for presidential campaigns, a post-Watergate initiative hailed for decades as the best way to rid politics of the corrupting influence of money, may have quietly died over the weekend.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York became the first candidate since the program began in 1976 to forgo public financing for both the primary and the general election because of the spending limits that come with the federal money. By declaring her confidence that she could raise far more than the roughly $150 million the system would provide for the 2008 presidential primaries and general election, Mrs. Clinton makes it difficult for other serious candidates to participate in the system without putting themselves at a significant disadvantage.

Officials of the Federal Election Commission and advisers to several campaigns say they expect the two candidates who reach Election Day 2008 will raise more than $500 million apiece. Including money raised by other primary candidates, the total spent on the presidential election could easily exceed $1 billion.

People involved in the Republican primary campaign of Senator John McCain of Arizona say he, too, is beginning to seek private donations for the primary and general elections, albeit with the option of returning them. A longtime proponent of campaign finance change, Mr. McCain has recently removed his name as a co-sponsor of a bill to expand the presidential public financing program.

Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, another Republican primary contender, has already decided to forgo public financing for the primaries. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a rival to Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic nomination, declined to comment, as did spokesmen for several other candidates.

In a sense, Mrs. Clinton was merely confirming what many in Washington already knew: that the public financing system has failed to keep pace with the torrents of money flowing toward the presidential elections. In 2004, President Bush and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, each opted out of the system for the primaries but not the general election. By accepting the public financing, they had to agree not to raise or spend any private money for the period after their nominating conventions.

But when Mr. Bush raised some $270 million, and Mr. Kerry about $235 million, it became clear that major-party candidates could raise far more from private donors than from the public system...

So to the devil with the public system designed to end campaign corruption; after all, the corrupt have figured out how to win the last few presidential $elections in spite of it. The Clintons, the self-proclaimed bastions of the progressive liberals in America, once again have shown that they do an awfully good job of progressing the neoconservative agenda.

Jeff Cohen notices something odd here:

Prominent pundits seem ecstatic over Hillary Clinton's entry into the presidential race just days after Barack Obama's media-created candidacy became official. Media talking heads are having so much fun lately they don't seem to notice that our political system is failing to address ever-worsening problems: social, environmental, fiscal and imperial.

Indeed, our country's political decline in recent decades has been abetted by the decline in mainstream media. The same media outlets that were complicit in the disastrous Iraq War are bent on turning politics into an insular celebrity club in which only they get to anoint front-runners.

If the torch of leadership passes from Bush I to Clinton I to Bush II to Clinton II, it will be a loss for our country - but a victory for a corrupt Beltway press corps that abhors fresh ideas, especially those that challenge its power and privilege. It was a frightened national press corps that vilified the netroots supporters of Democratic outsider Ned Lamont in defense of warhorse Joe Lieberman.

For the coming election season to be fact-based and reality-based instead of just power-based, independent media (online and off) will have to play a bigger role in shaping the debate and correcting the record. For example, a recent San Francisco Chronicle news report (headlined "Obama Emerges as Clinton's Rival for Dems' Left") asserted that Hillary Clinton was "widely regarded as the left's most influential voice inside the now-revered Clinton White House."

Widely regarded? Actually, progressives see Hillary Clinton as having been consistently wrong on the war and a host of other issues, especially trade. Her absurdly bureaucratic health-care proposal in 1993 - shaped by and for big insurance companies - was a slap in the face of unions, Congress members and grassroots forces who'd built a movement for simple, nonprofit national health insurance: In effect, enhanced Medicare for all. She helped set back the cause of universal coverage for years.

And far from being "revered," many Democratic activists see the Clinton era as one of decline in which Democrats lost their strong majorities in the US Senate, US House, governorships and state legislatures. It's simple math.

The 2008 presidential election is shaping up as a test of the power and capacity of new independent media vs. old conglomerate-dominated media. And a test of grassroots/netroots politics vs. corporatized Democratic politics...

Meanwhile, chicago dyke notices that the Congressional leaders are having a little trouble with this "Leadership" concept.

...In the year since top Democrats started demanding their own party leadership not work to stop the war, 907 U.S. soldiers have been killed. Of course, that’s never reported by the Washington press corps when they hear the same Democrats preach a “go slow” approach. But that doesn’t mean those troops didn’t die, and that the people still telling us to “go slow” should be regarded as even mildly credible when it comes to national security. The fact that the people who get things wrong over and over and over again are granted financial and political rewards on the Beltway cocktail party circuit doesn’t mean these people are doing anything other than running the country into the ground...

Yes, but look at those campaign contributions!