McCain On Obama's Fundraising

By: Hilzoy

Here's John McCain's response to Barack Obama's fundraising totals for September (h/t):

"I'm saying that history shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal.

I'm not comparing it with -- I'm saying this is the first since the Watergate scandal that any candidate for president of the United States, a major party candidate, has broken the pledge to take public financing.

We enacted those reforms because of that scandal. We know that we let unlimited amounts of money -- in this case $200 million unreported -- and there's already been stories of people who have made small contributions multiple times and all that.

I'm saying it's laying a predicate for the future that can be very dangerous. History has shown that."

It seems pretty clear to me that McCain is saying this because he wants to plant the idea that there's something scandalous or unsavory about Obama's fundraising in people's minds. However, it's worth noticing what point he might have been trying to make, had he actually meant what he said.

Allowing "unlimited amounts of money" into political campaigns could mean one of two things. First, it might mean allowing individual donors to give as much money as they want. This is what has caused scandals in the past: when Nixon turned out to have gotten $2 million in campaign pledges from milk producers and milk support prices went up shortly thereafter, for instance. But that's illegal now: as a result of those scandals, there are strict limits on what an individual can give to a political campaign. So presumably that's not what McCain is taking about.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_10/015266.php