Critiquing the government is no longer a socially acceptable action. The knee-jerk response from most people - supporters of the current government or not - is usually: "If you don't like the way things are, why don't you run for office and change things?"
Of course. Why not? When I turn 35, I could even run for president, right?
Sure. As long as I can put up $100 million - and that's just to get started.
"There is a growing sense that there is going to be a $100 million entry fee at the end of 2007 to be considered a serious candidate," Michael E. Toner, chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said in a Saturday Washington Post article.
Candidates in both major parties - and theoretically any other party that can muscle its way in on the technicality that our country is not exclusively a two-party system - are expected to need much larger sums of money than ever before.
Since 1976, a public funding system - in which the candidates receive federal funds in exchange for spending limits - has upheld the election. This funding program was started as a response to the Watergate scandal. Fantastic.
However, during the last few elections, the election has slowly been breaking down. Most analysts expect 2008 will be the year the system fails entirely. The result? No spending limits and an increased need to raise vast sums of money well in advance of the election.
Estimates of total expenditures for the entire 2008 campaigning process hover around $400 million or so. This is a step up from the 2004 election, in which both George W. Bush and John Kerry chose not to adhere to the public funding system, and they raised totals of $274.7 million and $253 million, respectively, according to the Washington Post article. If they had continued the existing funding system, they would have been limited to just a little more than $44 million each.
What does this mean for the rest of us? With spending limits removed, should we expect to be bombarded with four-minute ads for presidential candidates every half-hour on every station? Will candidates buy out radio stations, television stations or even people?
This is not to say they aren't and wouldn't do so anyway, but with an unlimited ceiling for their spending, candidates could vastly increase the media saturation - and corruption - of their campaigns. Everyone has a price, and with the buffers removed, there is nothing stopping your friendly neighborhood megalomaniacs from meeting each and every person's price tag.
What this also means is that smaller-scale candidates, such as Evan Bayh, will have almost no chance of raising enough money to compete with more visible - or financially and socially backed - candidates when the time comes. Of course, a big part of running any campaign, especially early on, is to secure the support of financial giants and backers, which are usually corporations and businesses. But if these smaller-scale candidates want to match, or even compare to, the funds of their titanic competitors, they will have to start fund-raising earlier, spend more time raising money and spend more money on getting their names out.
Yes, that's right, you can be absolutely confident that in 2008 the United States will have the best president money can buy.
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