One of the satisfying features of the election just ended is its vindication of the Supreme Court’s decision, in Buckley v. Valeo,* striking down limits to what rich people can spend on their own political campaigns. The limits were passed with the idea that they would level the playing field between ordinary mortals running for public office and rich mortals doing the same. They were voided by the Supreme Court on the grounds that they unduly restricted the right of individuals to engage in the political process. Now we have come through an election in which one candidate, Meg Whitman of EBay, spent something like $142 million in an effort to get elected to a coast governorship and, though she was challenged by a candidate who spent but a fraction of that amount, ended up being drubbed.

It happens that we would have voted for Mrs. Whitman on policy grounds, but her defeat is satisfying for the principle that it illuminates, which is that it is difficult to just purchase an election. The same is true for another candidate for whom we’d have voted, Linda McMahon in Connecticut, who we thought was splendid but who handily lost the race for senator against Richard Blumenthal despite spending something like $50 million of her own money. We don’t mean here to mock either Mmes. Whitman or McMahon; their outlays were an enormous patriot bet, and we have been arguing for years that the greater the spending, the greater debate, and have held for the proposition that there should be no restrictions on contributions or spending, nor — and here we’re with Justice Thomas — requirements of disclosure.

The salient point for us, though, is not about the prohibitions that were laid on the Congress in the First Amendment. Rather they are about the virtues of the fund-raising process, which we would characterize this way: The very effort of going out and trying to raise money from voters is one way of connecting with them. The small dinners, the big dinners, the concerts, the door-to-door fund raising, the mailings, the television and internet ads asking for money, these are all ways of meeting voters, asking them to invest in one’s candidacy, including them, respecting them. We haven’t done a double-blind study. But our sense is that the exchange of any kind of campaign contribution creates a tangibility to politics for millions of people that outlays of by the candidate, in and of itself, just can’t buy.

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* A New Yorker, Senator Buckley, among others, sued the secretary of the Senate, Francis Valeo, who was also a member of the Federal Election Commission.