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From the NY Times op/ed section:

Campaigns generate headlines with the tough decisions they make. On Thursday, Barack Obama’s campaign made waves with an easy one. Mr. Obama’s decision to leave the public financing system elicited the predictable outrage among reformers (and the McCain camp), but it was probably the most obvious and inevitable decision he’ll make all year — justified both politically and ethically.

By freeing his campaign from the public system, Mr. Obama can continue to raise donations from his vast base of supporters, who have made his campaign thus far the best-financed in history. Mr. Obama is rightly counting on them to raise far more than the $84 million in public funds he could expect to receive from public financing.

Mr. Obama may be on slippery ground because of his previous commitment to stick with the public system. But given that his campaign essentially embodies the ideals of reform — to a degree no one seriously thought possible just a few years ago — it’s going to be difficult for the McCain campaign or the chorus of scolds to generate much traction on the issue. After all, Mr. Obama’s all but certain financial advantage in the campaign will be derived from donors of modest means — not wealthy vested interests.

Obama left the publicly funding election system for a system funded by the public. There are two chief complaints; that he said he would work with the Republican nominee to have a fairly funded fight and now he’s breaking his word, and that this sets a dangerous precedent. Obama has disingenuously claimed his reason for leaving is to level the playing field since history the Republican camp have used “527 groups” — third-party political groups that aren’t allowed to coordinate their efforts with the campaign, but are freed from all other financial limits. (The most famous being the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that ran a smear campaign against John Kerry in 2004 campaign.) The reality is that the Republicans haven’t really deployed any 527s this cycle, though they may, and the better and more honest reason would simply be that Obama would be foolish to turn down the likely hundreds of millions of dollars from small donors he’s likely to get.

In an ironic twist, John McCain who has been loudly complaining about Obama’s lack of ethics is actually violating federal election law during this primary season. He opted into the public system to guarantee a loan, then backed out of the public system without permission which is illegal. The Federal Election Commission is currently without enough members to vote on the matter, but the chairman (a Republican) has denounced McCain’s action and improper already.

So what does this all mean? Obama will campaign hard in more states than any other candidate ever has, and will campaign in every state in the union, which no one has ever done. He’ll do so in the faint shadow of his questionable reasoning, while McCain will continue to spend until the Republican National Convention money he is legally barred from spending. After the RNC, he’ll be limited to the $84m and whatever the independent 527s want to invest on their own advertising.

This also means that somewhere between $200m-$400m will be spent on the campaigning for this election, on top of the countless millions already spent. Ad into that what the various networks have spent on their staff, ad revenue, etc and we have an election cost escalating far beyond more countries’ GDP. The race of the president of the United States is certainly important, but that seems an obscene amount of money in light of the cheap costs dent poverty, disease or illiteracy around the world.

Image courtesy Jay D on Flickr.