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Farhad, as much as I generaly enjoy your well-researched pieces, I do think you often miss a basic and important point in the story you're reporting. Such is the case here. Democrats are not abandonning their principles in fighting restrictions on 527 groups, because there is a difference between contributing money to an individual (or that individual's party) and contributing money to an advocacy group.
The former buys ACCESS and sets up the expectation of RECIPROCITY. The latter buys the ability to be heard -- harder and harder to do and yet more vitally needed these days if you're not a corporation or lobbyist. The former is about money as power, while the latter is about money as granting the ability for free speech to be heard loudly enough to have the potential to be persuasive.
Persuasion is not a crime, is not unethical -- even if the case it's making is untrue -- and should not be regulated. Moneyed access to individuals who make laws and parties that control houses of Congress (and more), on the other hand, is exactly the kind of class imbalance that democracy seeks to rectify.
Saying the Democrats should be for regulating ALL money that enters the campaign process, no matter who it goes to or what it does, is as much a non-sequitur as Republicans insisting that all tax cuts are equally good.
