Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Law Students Blogs -> Harrell Blog

Law Students

: Harrell Blog

Staggering

By pharrell

The sums that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama raised this month are staggering--$35 million for Clinton (so far), and a possible $50 million haul for Barack.

Both candidates raised the overwhelming majority of that money online, mostly from smaller donors, a fact that should fundamentally alter the campaign finance debate going forward. There's a real difference between bundlers raising $35 million in $2,300 increments and some 300,000 citizens making $25, $100, and $200 contributions a candidate they believe in--and the traditional rationale for campaign finance regulations, that they're needed to limit the influence of wealthy special interests, may simply not apply anymore. Or perhaps we should understand Democratic fundarising this year as the spectacular success of campaign finance regulations: by limiting candidates to $2,300 per donor per election and mostly cutting off the spigot of "soft money," we forced our politicians to figure out how to engage hundreds of thousands of small donors in politics. We've limited the influence of special interests not by prohibiting their participation, but by drowning them out. That's a desirable development.

P.S. Sen. Clinton's decision to announce her total today, a day before the end of the month, was a clever tactical move. She had to suspect that Barack outraised her, and, had she let him go first, the storyline would have been "Barack against bests Clinton by wide margin." As it is, she gets a day (or at least a few hours) of media glory for the strength of her raw numbers before Obama weighs in, probably tomorrow.

Full post as published by Harrell Blog on February 29, 2008 (boomark / email).