One of the main effects of a campaign finance system is to encourage people to enter (or remain in) a campaign who otherwise wouldn’t. Indeed, if campaign finance doesn’t have this effect, it’s a failure.

Suppose someone is considering getting into a race and, to raise early money, offers lenders a claim on later public financing. Such an arrangement seems essentially identical to what McCain did here, and might well be necessary for a candidate without deep pockets to take part in a comeptitive campaign.

What Schmitt (who I generally like) calls “a promise to perpetuate a fraud on the American taxpayers” sounds to me like “a promise to stay in the race when he might otherwise drop out”, which, given McCain’s movement from dead-in-the-water to presumptive nominee, seems like exactly the sort of outcome the public financing system ought to produce.

And this from The Newspaper of Record. Maybe a McCain presidency is the best this country deserves.

I don’t think the “McCain’s lawyers are better than the other candidates’” is a particularly damning criticism. But, then again, I am a lawyer, and a good one, so it’s in my interest to say that sort of thing.

Posted by John Quiggin

Or course, the ‘too hard’ doesn’t refer to the readership, nor to the reporters, and probably not even to the editors of the NYT. My guess is that the senior editors, publishers and owners find such things ‘too hard’.

I just can’t wait for the general election campaign, when the Very Serious Media will turn on their current darling, Obama, with a vengeance, while continuing to give Saint McCain a free pass. Ugh.

No, McCain-Feingold is about contribution limits, not public campaign financing. So McCain’s not a hypocrite! We can all breath easy now!

McCain took over $100,000 in campaign contributions from banker Charles Keating, and also flew to Bermuda numerous times in Keating’s private jet. When federal regulators tried to seize Keating’s bank, McCain urged them to back off. Keating was eventually convicted of bilking 21,000 mostly elderly investors of their life savings, and served 4 years in jail for fraud. McCain is also believed to be a hypocrite, as he later supported campaign finance reform.

In any case, if McCain is going to run as a straight-talking campaign finance reformer, it’s worth pointing out that he used a scheme as convoluted and shady as a subprime mortgage to subvert the campaign finance system.

Sure, but they should be condemned when they do so. In this case, McCain was specifically forbidden from using potential matching funds as collateral for a loan and then opting out of the public funding system. He did so de facto but not de jure. And now he’s attacking Obama for alleged hypocrisy on taking public funds. Why not point out that he’s not clean on the issue?

That would be the McCain/Feingold public campaign funding system?

That’s loser talk. Obviously the Republicans are going to bend and break the rules as much as they can. Besides numerous examples involving the Supreme Court’s selection of the President, torture, and wiretapping, there’s also Texas’s between-census redistricting, the plan to overturn the judicial filibuster, and on and on. In this environment, I support candidates who fight to win, not boy scouts concerned about possibly committing some technical violation.

And let me point out too that the charges of hypocrisy raised by zamfir and Quiggin are pretty lame too. Hypocrisy is the most minor of sins. McCain voted for torture last week! For all I know that makes him a hypocrite, but such charges really miss the point.

After having been involved in the Keating Five Scandal in the 1980s, John McCain has tried to make his name synonymous with campaign finance reform, and with limits on campaign spending. But a complex loan arrangement he made with his bankers enabled him to avoid those limits, while keeping the option of claiming public financing.