Al Adinolfi on CTs "Clean Elections"
Here's a five minute clip that profiles several 2008 State Legislative candidates and their views on public funding for their campaigns:
Al is featured about a minute or two into the video.
Tim White
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
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4 comments:
Quite a testimonial for public financing! I think it clearly worked well in CT this year.
Is it applicable to a national campaign? Or is the scale too great? I'm not sure, but I sure wish it was!
The theme I liked best was how it gave candidates more time to actually meet and talk with voters and the ability to meet with them without wondering how much money they might be able to give.
Go Connecticut!
Yeah, I agree with it. It stinks that our system smells so bad, but it does. And we need some mechanism to begin rebuilding confidence in the system.
I wonder how many people actually used it? Out of the people that used it how many won?
I've heard the numbers of people who participated. I don't recall them though. And I have no idea how many participants won / lost. Though I think it was three incumbent Rs and two incumbent Ds who lost... out of 151 in the House. So I don't view that as having much impact... though the globals here in CT were pretty massively in favor of Obama and the Dems.
Personally, I see two issues addressed by the public financing:
1) confidence in the system
2) a level playing field
About the confidence issue, I think public funding helps. But I see no reason for full confidence until our legislature allows for public corruption to be effectively investigated at the state level. Until that happens, public funding is masking a much bigger issue IMO.
About a level playing field, I think I outraised Rep. Nardello by about $50k to $35k or so in 2006. So I don't see the level playing field necessarily making a big difference in the result of elections.
Again, my view is that it's a step toward public confidence. But public confidence will not really return until the legislature votes to allow it to return by allowing for a variety of law enforcement measures, such as subpoena power for state's attorneys.
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