What's more important to Senator Mitch McConnell -- health insurance for 157,996 of Kentucky's children or big money donors from Big Tobacco, HMOs, and other health interests?

You can guess the answer by the mere fact that I even have to ask the question.

With an imminent Senate vote on S-CHIP, the children's health insurance program, we at Public Campaign Action Fund made a poignant, hard-hitting web ad that raises this question for Sen. McConnell.

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Big news today - a bill to provide public financing for Congressional elections was introduced by Dick Durbin and Arlen Specter.  Here's how it works - if you get a certain number of people to give you $5, then money is unlocked for a campaign based on your district, the media market, and/or population size for various states.  If you face a wealthy opponent who self-funds, more money is unlocked to balance out the terrain.

A few weeks ago at PFAW's Young Elected Officials Network, I talked to one legislator in Arizona who told me about how Arizona elections changed from 1998 onward based on the new public financing system.  It didn't help Democrats or Republicans, but it changed who ran and won in primaries.  On the right, business-backed moderates lost primaries as a populist base became more important.  On the left, the number of minorities and women running increased, though mostly they didn't win.  The right was successful at understanding the system first, and capably organized to take full advantage of it from 1998-2004.  At this point, Democrats have caught up.

This system on a Federal level will lead to a lot more challenges, much more diversity in who runs for office both racially and economically, and will increase the number of poor and middle class people in office, proportionately.  I don't think it's going to privilege Democrats or Republicans, but it will in all likelihood privilege outsiders and those with a populist base more than those with media and various insider connections.  

Jerome's hopefully going to come on and argue against this bill, and we can have a debate this week.

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For far too long, incumbents and prolific fundraisers have held an overwhelming advantage in any election. Grassroots candidates usually don't stand much of a chance, as they don't get to use the trappings of office to spread their messages for free, and they usually don't have the money to wage a viable campaign. Money is playing an increasingly important role in politics today.

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You may have noticed a discussion of public financing on MyDD over the last few months.  A system of public financing of elections iis set up and working in a few states - Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine.  And while it's too soon to judge Connecticut, the system does work in Maine and Arizona.  David Donnelly of the excellent group Public Campaign has come on to MyDD and blogged about the issue and answered questions about the efficacy of the systems currently in place, which is incidentally why federalism works.  We can test things out in the states before scaling them.

Here's why I've been blogging about public financing. Tom Hamburger and Janet Hook of the LA Times have written an excellent article about the business lobby and the Democrats in Congress (if you like their work, send them nice email - tom.hamburger@latimes.com and janet.hook@latimes.com).

Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi terrified the oil industry late last year when she outlined her priorities for the new Democratic majorities in Congress. Within the first 100 hours, she promised, they would "roll back the multibillion-dollar subsidies for Big Oil."

Last week, however, when Pelosi (D-San Francisco) won House approval of the much-touted bill socking it to the oil companies, it turned out to be considerably less drastic than many in the industry originally feared. Out of an estimated $32 billion in subsidies and tax breaks that the oil companies are scheduled to receive over the next five years, the final House bill cut $5.5 billion.

It's not just oil: From one end of the House Democrats' "first 100 hours" agenda to the other, businesspeople and their lobbyists have found success amid the fear in dealing with the new Congress.

Surprising as it might seem in view of the Democrats' public rhetoric, business groups are getting their telephone calls returned. And they're getting plenty of face time with the new House and Senate leaders.

Thanks to this access, the oil industry fended off many features it considered most objectionable in the proposed energy bill, and the big pharmaceutical companies had success keeping some provisions out of the new House Medicare drug bill.

And, while the House was passing its minimum-wage bill, small-business lobbyists were working the Senate to win tax breaks for their clients in the Senate's version of the bill.

"There was a lot more anxiety initially because of not knowing what was going to transpire," said Stuart Roy, a member of the prominent Washington lobby shop DCI Group and once an aide to Tom DeLay when DeLay (R-Texas) was House majority leader. Now, Roy said, "the anxiety level is down."

Robert Reich is very unhappy with the 100 hours agenda, and it's hard to refute his claims.  Perhaps Reich has the weary attitude of a man who has seen Democratic leaders enact very bad policies under the guise of progressive populism.  The signs are unmistakeable that this is a real danger going forward.  For instance, front-runner Hillary Clinton's senior health care advisor Laurie Rubiner came from the Republican side of the aisle, and Rubiner's health care solution, as written in the Atlantic, begins with "Believe it or not, there is a politically appealing way to achieve universal health-care coverage: simply require all U.S. residents to buy insurance, with government help if necessary." If I became incredibly cynical, I might believe that Senator Clinton is going to make subsidies to the health insurance industry one of two priorities for her Presidential run.  I assume her PR will be better than that, of course, and dress it up as 'insurance subsidies for kids'.

I'm not as cynical as Reich, and I believe that Nancy Pelois will be a great Speaker. The Democrats in Congress need help, though, in order to really legislate a progressive agenda. It's not enough to get them elected, or even to support good policies. We have to get rid of the pressure that compels them to spend much of their time begging for money for the wealthy.

The structural rot here is that politicians have to raise a massive amount of money to be reelected.  We're not talking netroots amounts, we're talking in the hundreds of millions, and pretty soon, billions.  That amount of money can only come from (a) corporate interests and (b) really rich people.  So Hillary Clinton, to pick a random politician, is now in the top echelon of recipients of health care industry cash of all politicians.  And she's the top Democrat in the race for President.

Though I'm picking on Senator Clinton, it's not really her fault that the game is rigged this way.  Well it is a little, since changing the game isn't her priority and she's a stahhh.  The problem is the gobs of money required to run for office, which immediately consigns large segments of the population to being unable to run for office.  This includes lots of those fighting Dems we talked about in 2004, many of whom didn't have the connections to raise all the money, but given the chance to organize instead of fundraise from rich people could have put a lot more seats in play.  

Public financing is the only solution to this problem.  It works, pulling the incentives out of the system towards corruption and subsidies for corporate elites.  It is a structural solution to the pressure Pelosi feels to bring business lobbyists to the table, even though they have stolen from the public for at least a decade.  We should get behind it.  And members in Congress who think that it's the obviously correct solution, but don't believe it's possible to enact, should reconsider their position.  It won't be enacted without leadership, but it can and will be done.

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Matt (here and here) and Kos have written posts recently about the ethics and lobbying reforms in Congress, and the need to reassess the whole regulatory scheme of campaign reform. They've been joined by lots of other commentary, like former Secretary of Labor Bob Reich on Marketplace this morning and David Sirota (here and just about everywhere), arguing that Congress has left the major part of the money in politics problem untouched - the private financing of public elections.

Matt's argument, in a nutshell is this: process reforms that rely on regulation and policing bad behavior always fail to live up to their billing, and what we need to do instead is shift the paradigm to public financing:

Let's be honest - quasi-corrupt practices such as secret earmarks are not the result just of bad people in politics, they are the result of structural factors that encourage the legalized bribery of our governing class.  If you restrict secret earmarks without changing any other incentives, you'll simply push the quasi-corruption into another legal vehicle designed to bilk the public and hide the costs.

Kos extends the criticism of the ethics and lobbying reforms to other types of campaign reforms, like the proposed and rejected FEC regulations on bloggers political activities.

Here's the problem, and I saw this up front and personal during the FEC fight with the "reformer" groups -- they've lost sight of the purpose of [campaign finance reform].

In their minds, money is inherently evil. Their efforts are predicated on the impossible -- getting money out of politics. But as Stoller notes, that just ain't gonna happen, Buckley or not. All speech costs money of some sort these days. Even getting yourself to a street protest costs money (gas or transit).

So is the problem really money?

I would argue that the problem is when money is used to drown out competing voices. It was a key argument we bloggers used in defending ourselves against the "reformers" -- that while money could drown out other voices in radio or television, the inherent nature of the web meant there was no scarcity.

Still, he withholds judgment on public financing, despite its impact in dealing with the very problem he identifies.

These are not an academic question for me, or for progressives. I work on this issue day in, day out for  Public Campaign and Public Campaign Action Fund, the leading national group on public financing. I have worked on Clean Elections for a dozen years, dating back to when I ran the Maine ballot question campaign to pass the first full public financing law in the country. Six additional states (including Arizona and Connecticut for all state offices) and two cities have followed suit. We are working in coalition with many of the organizations identified in the posts by Matt and Markos, and count them as strong allies in the public financing fight.

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