It is worth the read.
It is estimated that he already has used $35 million of his roughly $250 million personal fortune. And if Mitt makes the cut to be the Republican nominee, during the next 10 months, he surely will surpass Ross Perot's $60 million infusion into his own 1992 candidacy. To me, such excessive self-financing of one's campaign is not only a competitive injustice that rivals the use of steroids by athletes but also a fundamental flaw in the general race for president, which requires better campaign finance reform.
Yea, Harrogate has long felt Publicly Financed Federal Campaigns would be the way to go. Note the great line in the great movie Bulworth, when Warren Beatty says: "If you want a Senator who's not on the take, give him free air time so we won't have to fake." Now, some might argue that since Romney is spending so much of his own money, it actually opens the possibility of him being less on the take. But to invert a formula recently deployed by Hillary Clinton, this quibble might address the prose-governance of Beatty's argument, but not the poetic spirit of it, which reminds us that there needs to be an economically level playing field in the area of elections. Will there ever be a totally level playing field? Of course not, but it is always something worth striving for.
Just before moving into a Rhetorically clever tie-in with the sub-prime housing crisis, Norris also writes:
The truth is, for Mitt, that his presidential run is the biggest investment gamble of his life. And with the White House appraising at roughly $106 million, he's betting his largest wager on owning the Oval Office.
Well, stuff to chew on at any rate. Of course, Norris's Huckabee bias is out there for all to see. But the issue he addresses is rendered nonetheless serious thereby. Fortunately, last night's results sent a signal that,even among Republicans, money alone cannot be translated directly into votes.
1 comment:
One interesting aspect: we can judge Mitt's business sense by the amount of money he puts in to his own campaign.
Of course, if he puts more money in for a losing cause, then he should be ruled out for president because he violates his own standards: he would be an economic dupe to spend all that money and lose.
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