WHEN IT COMES to the corrosive influence of money in politics, the 2012 campaign has presented a trifecta of troubling developments. They are, in ascending order of worry: the complete collapse of the presidential public financing system set up in the wake of Watergate; the explosion of the super PAC political committees, which are allowed to take unlimited checks to finance independent expenditures for or against particular candidates; and the proliferation of “dark money,” or spending by nonprofit organizations and trade groups that, unlike super PACs, are excused from having to reveal their donors. The end result is a system awash in cash and dangerously ripe for corruption.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-campaign-awash-in-cash/2012/11/04/c422a6c8-2537-11e2-9313-3c7f59038d93_story.html?hpid=z4



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2012 07:59PM by ferfux.

Though I'm more than a little disturbed by the huge numbers of bucks that are floating around, it's not clear to me that anything ultimately negative has resulted from it.

People have always been able to pool money (or, for the uber-rich, simply use their own) to make trouble of various sorts (like paying off prostitutes to lie, etc).

But the various campaign-oriented spending of the bucks certainly doesn't look like a win...yet.

Maybe the PACs simply need a little more maturity in their spending habits - you know, instead of 579 TV ads per day maybe a few fleets of buses to get voters to the polls or something like that.