Letters to the Editor
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False equivalence between McCain and Obama
The Obama and McCain situations only appear similar at a distance. When you look at the details, they are completely different.
Clearly, Obama is technically within the letter of the law, and morally within the spirit of the law.
The public financing system is intended to prevent moneyed interests from buying votes. "Moneyed interests" does not include a million people giving $109 each.
It's not as if Obama were saying, oh gee, Warren Buffet/George Soros/Bill Gates is going to give me a huge chunk of cash, I really don't want to be bound by that public financing system. When you have a million small contributors, that *is* public financing, just not the kind that's run through the government.
There are plenty of genuinely ambiguous situations in which we have to make difficult moral judgemen, but this isn't one of them. McCain is trying to find loopholes in the law that bears his name. Obama is receiving an unanticipated amount of support from, um, the public, has made no legal commitments on this issue, and is cannot reasonably be expected to spurn this direct support from individual small contributors so as to satisfy some pundits who have their noses so deep in a rulebook that they can't see the moral issues the rules are based on.