I'm trying to boil down to a headline what I think progressives should take from Mark Schmidt's Fresh Start for Campaign Reform. Essentially, the thirty year project to limit "bad" campaign contributions should be dropped, kaput. It's close to hopeless, given the First Amendment and the endless loopholes big money finds.

Instead, focus on putting MORE MONEY into the system, "good" money representing those with less financial resources. Instead of trying to limit the speech of the wealthy, amplify the voices of poor and working families through public financing.

But let me add a few observations and points beyond Mark's:

First, the general progressive movement needs to educate themselves about the workings of the "clean elections" public financing systems in Maine and Arizona and North Carolina (focused on judicial races). In those systems, candidates solicit small contributions (usually $5) to qualify for pubic financing, after which the candidates receiving public funds cannot receive other private funds. The results:

• In Arizona, 59 percent of eligible candidates qualified used the clean elections system.9 of 11 state officials were elected using the system, including the Governor, Secretary of State and Attorney General and 38 of 90 legislators won this year using the system.
• In Maine, 84 percent of the election winners were clean elections candidates.
• In 2006, 8 out of the 12 judges running qualified for clean election funds. Four out of the five winning judges were clean election participants.

And the result of these systems have been profound in opening up those elections to less financed groups, especially communities of color:

• In Arizona for example, traditional candidates secured less than 30% of their contributions from zip codes with per capita incomes below $40,000, while Clean Elections candidates secured up to 68% of their contributions from zip codes with per capita incomes below $40,000.
• In a study of the first Arizona election using Clean Money in 2000, 80 percent of Latinos using Clean Money said they would not have sought office without the Clean Elections system in effect.
• Compared to 2000, when 13 candidates of color ran in the primaries, there were 37 candidates of color running by the 2002 election, 21 of whom ran with clean election funds.

Public financing profoundly changes the dynamics of politics in states with the system. Not only does it lessen the power of corrupt money, it also frees up candidates from spending most of their time fundraising; instead they spend their time doing broad outreach to collect qualifying small donations, then are free to campaign without fundraising burdens for the rest of the campaign.

What makes these systems also work is that beyond the initial allocation of public funds, the system doesn't concentrate on limiting funds by those refusing public funds. Instead, if a clean elections candidate is outspent, their clean elections opponent receive additional matching funds to help them compete. So special interests can spend money, but since their spending will be matched dollar for dollar (up to a certain level), it helps neutralize the advantage.

Which is why you get such success by clean elections candidates in states where it's been implemented.

The bottom-line, as Mark (and Micah) indicated is that where the whole regime of federal campaign finance reform has been a near complete and total failure, these kinds of state public financing reforms are working and are where reform needs to be focused.

For a bit more information on Clean Elections, you can find it here and here.