The recent election of incoming Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has been roundly satirized as an exercise in corrupt electioneering, intimidation, and bribery—a latter-day show trial, in a backward country full of shady oligarchs, pickled herring, and borscht. “Ah Russia!, what can you expect,” Americans tut, indulging in a moment of self-congratulation about our own wholesome democracy with the time-honored tradition of fair elections. In rare moments of self-doubt, we remind ourselves that the Electoral College, butterfly ballots, and Diebold voting machines are certainly preferable to polonium poisoning.

It’s a pretty persuasive point, and one I would tend to agree with. But all is not rosy on the Rappahannock. Mr. Medvedev’s election coincided extraordinarily closely with a major story that showed things aren’t so pure this side of Siberia either. The New York Times’ story on John McCain’s possible inappropriate relationship with a lobbyist should give us serious pause about the state of our Democracy.

Not because John McCain might have had an affair. Nor because the woman in question was a lobbyist. But because behind the sensationalism of the story itself and the coverage that followed (including McCain’s feeble defense that he knows a number of lobbyists) was the essential assumption that every politician flies about on private jets, runs committees before which their contributors appeared, or spends quality time with a class of people who get paid based on how many “connections” they command. In short, it was the banality, not the potentially sensational particulars about the McCain story that should terrify us.

The perennial lament that money has too great a hold on politicians is so engrained that it provokes nothing more than a grunt of assent of the sort that the statements “America is strong,” “terrorism is bad,” or “borscht is mediocre” might evoke. But it’s not just a problem. It’s crippling. It’s debilitating. It’s omnipresent. Public financing of elections is not simply a potential solution, it is the clear and pressing remedy—one without which a functioning democracy is simply impossible.

Politicians can wax lyrical about how consorting with and taking contributions from lobbyists is simply a result of converging interests. But it’s impossible to take a contribution and then not feel some kind of obligation to the donor. Even if that simply results in more face-time for contributors or their lobbyists and then deciding against them, the system is irrevocably tainted.

One perennial argument in against campaign finance limits shields contributions behind the banner of the First Amendment. But money simply is not speech. It isn’t expression either—one can refrain from giving money to a candidate and still speak out perfectly freely in their favor, wear t-shirts, hold rallies, and so on. But even if campaign contributions were speech, there is strong precedent for regulating their influence in politics. Political donations, lobbyist fundraisers, and free gifts to lawmakers, cast in the most charitable light, are “speech” to the extent that they attempt to influence events. So, of course, is murder, vandalism, and suddenly pulling down one’s underpants in public, but we have no problem rendering such things illegal. In fact, nearly every crime could be termed a form speech. Indeed, to allow freedom of speech in the political sense, preserved for each citizen and not simply those with enormous resources, fleets of lobbyists, and numerous demands, in seems quite clear that there must be absolute, strict freedom from such unequal speech.

It is impossible for me to understand how allowing industries to essentially write their own regulations through contact with and influence over lawmakers leaves our system any different from the most corrupt on the planet. Just because the influence of corporations, lobbyists, and millionaires extends into arcane areas and technical rules instead of fundamental questions about the rights of dissident media and politicians to publicly campaign does not make our political system any more just or democratic. We don’t have to poison our dissidents, because we simply ignore them. It is no wonder President Bush claims to have been persuaded of Russia’s status as an ally by a look into Vladimir Putin’s inscrutable eyes; he was in many ways seeing a mirror of our own nation.]]>