I've enjoyed working with Mark Schmitt ever since we met in the late 1990s; he was at the Open Society Institute and deeply involved in its work with the campaign finance reform movement, I was at Public Campaign as one of its senior analysts, working on the public financing side of the movement Mark writes about. I'm glad Mark is taking the time to survey the landscape of reform efforts in the last decade and to try to chart a way forward; it's vital that political movements take stock and periodically assess their assumption and efforts.

Mark's essay "Mismatching Funds" is, overall, a fair and comprehensive survey, in my humble opinion. I would have liked him to mention how the core congressional bill, McCain-Feingold, got watered down in the process of pushing it through Congress; between stripping out provisions that would have offered candidates some subsidized broadcast time and adding provisions doubling the individual contribution limit, the final bill arguably did very little to address how economic inequality distorts our political process, other than ban direct soft money fundraising by parties and candidates.

And I would have liked Mark to say a bit more about the successes of the full public financing model (a.k.a. Clean Elections) on the ground in Maine and Arizona, where a majority of candidates have run and been elected without dependence on private contributors. We now have abundant evidence going back through four election cycles that the new system encourages more candidates to run, encourages a more diverse candidate pool, evens the playing field between challengers and incumbents, and helps increase turnout. Legislators and advocacy groups in those states also say the new systems have helped other reforms pass; for example, Maine would not be as far along the path to a single-payer health care system or more affordable prescription drugs were it not for the Clean Elections system.

But these are quibbles and for all I know Mark did mean to note those things, but didn't have room.

I think Mark is absolutely right to criticize the reformers who have made limits on private money's role in politics their lodestar. However, his article doesn't make clear enough that this is NOT the central goal of the public financing camp. We want to expand the number of voices effectively involved in the political debate, not constrain it. And we realize it costs money to participate. (And though the internet is changing some of those economics in radically good ways, I don't think the rise in small donor fundraising by blogs as well as people-aggregators like ActBlue and MoveOn is enough by itself.)

My friend Adam Bonin covers well what happened in 2005 around the fight over whether the FEC should start regulating political blogs, and he's absolutely right that the limits camp made several big mistakes in that fight, needlessly alienating natural allies. But, as he points out, not everyone joined in the mistaken push to impose new restrictions on this new medium; my colleagues at Public Campaign chose to not endorse the Shays-Meehan approach to blogs because they realized something different and small-d democratic was happening with online politics. Instead of rushing to close an imaginary loophole that has yet to demonstrably "corrupt" politics, they chose to embrace the new online politics with gusto, starting an activist blog (The Daily DeLay) that went after Tom DeLay with alacrity and working hard to cultivate the netroots in support of the Clean Money model.

I think there's a deeper reason why groups like Public Campaign and its allies in various activist communities are taking a different approach to the campaign finance reform problem. These are not your parents' good-government groups. They are not stocked with well-intentioned lawyers, but with people who cut their teeth in state-based issue-organizing and coalition work. The concern Mark raises--that campaign finance reformers make process change more important than issue victories--does not describe these folks. They are in the reform fight precisely to win more power for ordinary people in politics, not because they are offended by money corruption in the abstract, but because of its ill effects on the average person.

Thus while the full public financing model may sound like another bit of policy wonkery to argue over (and god knows some advocates can get bogged down in the details of which model is best), the core idea of full public financing is to break the dependence of public representatives on private money, particularly large private contributors. Instead of investing endless energy in policing how private money flows in the process, the Clean Money approach focuses on creating an entirely different way to run a viable campaign for public office.

One final note: Mark's essay suggests that the reform movement overall has hit a plateau. I disagree. While I can't get into the details, we are literally on the verge of some impressive new developments on the congressional front, including the introduction of a bipartisan public financing bill supported by many of the most powerful mass membership organizations in the country. With people like Senator John McCain abandoning their leadership role (and their principles, I might add) on the issue, and others like Representative Marty Meehan leaving Congress for greener pastures, there is new leadership and a different, more diverse, coalition of support emerging. I don't think the nation's thirst for real reform has been quenched by the passage of some new measures aimed at lobbyists and ethics this winter; nor do I think we have learned the full extent of how the malefactors of wealth have feasted at the public trough the last few years. Stay tuned, the reform fight in Washington is about to enter a new chapter.