Letters to the Editor
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1st Amendment
I don't see how this can work. The 1st Amendment protects speech -- political speech above all. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that government cannot ban contributions to candidates or to issues. So nothing in this proposal can prevent large corporations or groups of private citizens or single individuals from spending millions of additional dollars -- whether as direct contributions or as contributions to issue advertisements. Large donors will still be able to contribute large amounts of money in ways the candidates will know about, and the problems will return.
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ONLY 643 days until the election ...
... to paraphrase Time Magazine's latest cover title.
I'm was fed up about 543 days ago with media hype (and we can hardly avoid it even here in Canada, short of crawling under a log) surrounding the 2008 election. I've heard so many Canadians say the same thing. When campaigning for the next US election starts but days after the inauguration of the current president, of course bazillions of dollars must be spent. Talk of limiting campaign spending is as effective as swatting flies in an outhouse so long as the US presidential election process is not first revised from the very depths of the sump.
It wasn't a great joy here, last federal election, to drive to the poll in sub-zero temps (Fahrenheit or Celcius, take your pick) with but a few weeks' notice of the upcoming federal election. At least there was no blizzard. The abbreviated campaign time actually accented who was able to think on his/her feet as opposed to those who could afford the best spin MD's. (Well, yeah, we still got Harper. Could have been worse.)
Neither system is infallible. I don't believe that either one can be proven to be superior to the other. I do believe that I am more likely to make the effort to get out and vote if I haven't been subjected to hundreds of days of - to put it politely - political rhetoric.
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A Contrarian Approach
My proposal is, let the candidates raise as much money as they want, any way they want. However they cannot spend it. All of it is escrowed and whomever raises the most money wins the election (no election necessary). Then the escrowed funds are divided among the losers on a gradual scale: 0% for the winner, 1% for second place, and so on with the most money going to the candidate who raised the least. Official candidates are limited to 20.