Obama Opts Out
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Senator Obama was met with a hail of denunciations yesterday for his decision to opt out of the “public” — i.e., taxpayer — campaign finance system and go with privately raised money for the general election campaign. The Republican National Committee denounced him. The McCain campaign denounced him. Longtime campaign finance law watchdog Fred Wertheimer denounced him. The president of Common Cause, Joan Claybrook, denounced him.
Well, if no one else is going to stick up for Mr. Obama, let us venture a try. Mr. Wertheimer and Ms. Claybrook we can understand — they’ve long been trying to keep private money out of politics. But the Republican national party and its presumptive nominee? We thought Republicans were supposed to be the ones that thought private enterprise could do better than big-government programs. Why should political finance be any different in this regard than, say health care or education?
By opting out of the system, Mr. Obama will be funding his campaign with money given voluntarily by supporters rather than money collected by the Internal Revenue Service, even if the IRS money is allocated from the tax revenues via an optional check-off. He also avoids an $84 million spending cap that comes as a condition on the government-collected money. That means voters will have the benefit of receiving more electioneering communications from the Obama campaign, leaving them more educated about the issues than they otherwise would have been.
It is true that Mr. Obama had earlier said he would accept public financing in the general election and is now changing his mind. But Mr. McCain also changed his mind on public financing in the primary after getting a loan against the collateral of the expected public money. The right move for Mr. McCain now would be to do what he did in the primary and to try to compete with Mr. Obama by energizing small donors and millions of individual Americans to support his campaign. There is nothing corrupt about this. It would save the IRS the burden of collecting funds for a political campaign, and it would allow Mr. McCain to spend competitively with Mr. Obama.
As for Mr. Obama, the best move for him would be to deflect the criticism by attacking Mr. McCain directly for his history of support for restrictions on campaign speech. Criticizing Mr. Obama for opting out of the government financing scheme and the spending limits that go along with it is just part of a long history by Mr. McCain of trying to stifle political speech in America, contrary to the ideals of the First Amendment. We wouldn’t go so far as to say that Mr. McCain deserves to lose this election. But if he does lose it and loses it because he was stuck with the restrictions of a taxpayer financed campaign, his desserts would contain an element of justness.