Ross Perot really started something.

The Texan’s independent campaign for president in 1992 not only inspired a set of maverick independent candidates, from Jesse Ventura to Kinky Friedman, but he opened the door to a new political class: the second-act billionaire politician.

Retirement used to mean a permanent vacation on the beaches of south Florida, but this new class of retiree is choosing to chase new heights of power in their golden years by using their lifetime of earnings to self-fund political campaigns.

Their stated goal of public service is noble, but the inherently unequal playing field leaves average citizen politicians at an almost insurmountable disadvantage.

This is evident in the current campaign of Mayor Bloomberg, where the able incumbent – worth $4 billion – is outspending his plebian opponent Fernando Ferrer by roughly 7-to-1, with no end to the money available to blanket the airwaves.

New Jersey Senator Corzine’s campaign for governor is greased by his personal fortune accumulated as head of Goldman Sachs. And while Mr. Corzine is worth “only” an estimated $260 million, he clearly belongs in that other ballpark of the super-rich and used his influence to fund a successful first-time run for the Senate. Now the statehouse seems likely to be next, despite a strong fight from Doug Forrester, a comparative pauper who earned just $12 million last year. The median annual income in the Garden State is $55,000.

Most recently, Rochester billionaire Tom Golisano announced his departure from the New York State Independence Party to explore a 2006 run for governor on the Republican line. Mr. Golisano, a three-time loser as a third-party candidate for that post, is ranked as the 283rd wealthiest person in the nation. That was sufficient to inspire President Clinton to place a call to his private residence in 2000 to discuss support for Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign, but will it be enough to buy control of Theodore Roosevelt’s home-state party? Only time will tell, but the prospect should be more enough to give honest voters cause to pause and then reject the bid.

The influence of money on politics is, of course, nothing new. Joseph Kennedy Sr. used his fortune as the 10th wealthiest man in America to fund the political fortunes of his three sons. One of the distinguishing features of this new crop of billionaire politicians is that they tend to be self-made billionaires – no small testament to the possibilities of America.

It is interesting to note, however, that one of the chief qualifications these self-funded candidates offer to voters is their presumed political independence. As the 1988 campaign of a Democratic Wisconsin senator, Herbert Kohl – the heir to a supermarket fortune worth over $100 million – claimed, “He’s Nobody’s Senator But Yours.” Mayor Bloomberg has repeatedly stressed his demonstrated independence in office as a key reason for his re-election. The credibility of these claims builds off public concern about the growing influence of big money special interests on our politics. But big money is precisely what these self-funded candidates represent in the most personal sense.

The old class-based assumptions of conservative ideological elitism from the super-rich seem not to neatly apply to this new class of second-act politicians. Mr. Corzine has been a highly partisan liberal Democrat while in office. Mr. Bloomberg was an enthusiastic Democratic fund-raiser before running for office in the comparative political freedom of the local Republican Party. Mr. Golisano has attempted to stake out the Ross Perot-like turf of fiscally conservative but socially moderate out-of-government reformer in his campaigns to date. In fact, of the roughly 40 U.S. senators who are millionaires, the top five – Massachusetts’ John Kerry; Wisconsin’s Herbert Kohl; West Virginia’s Jay Rockefeller; New Jersey’s John Corzine and California’s Dianne Feinstein – are all Democrats.

What is increasingly clear, however, is that the crippling cost of running a credible campaign is too often keeping all but the superrich out of competitive races, especially in high-cost media markets such as the Northeast. And in these races, the wealthiest feel qualified to run for the highest office available first, as if lower-level offices were not worth their time or money.

Instinctive blame-America-first self-flagellators can calm down before screaming that all this is a sign of our corrupt system – by far the wealthiest billionaire politician on the planet is Italy’s Prime Minister Berlusconi, who is worth an estimated $7 billion, while Lebanon’s assassinated prime minister, Rafik Al-Hariri, and Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra were also members of the Billionaire’s Club.

The evidence suggests, however, that there is a logical limit to those who argue that money equals free speech in politics. Overwhelming airwaves with self-serving messages can create a class of elected officials whose main qualification for office is not the content of their character or their vision of the future but the size of their wallet.

In this year’s New York City mayoral and New Jersey gubernatorial races, more money is likely to be spent than in Ronald Reagan’s entire 1980 campaign for president. There is no reason to expect this trend will get better, as the cost of entry into politics grows more and more prohibitive for average citizens. The result threatens to weaken both the concept and reality of participatory democracy. As former Nixon strategist turned political independent Kevin Phillips once wrote, “Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime – plutocracy by some other name.”