If Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) secures the Democratic nomination, he should renege on his commitment to accept public matching funds in the general election, Democratic strategists say.
Obama, who is still locked in a nomination battle with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), hedged during a debate Tuesday night when asked whether he would adhere to his pledge that he would enter into such an agreement.
{mosads}Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive GOP nominee, is dealing with his own problems regarding public financing but is calling on Obama to keep his promise. And with Obama raising $36 million in January, it’s not hard to see why some Republicans fear the Illinois senator’s fundraising abilities.
Democratic strategists contacted by The Hill say Obama should not cede that tremendous fundraising advantage, because it would allow McCain to start setting the terms of the race and risk a mismatched fight with outside groups that could enter the fray.
Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser to Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) failed bid in 2004, said accepting public funding “may have been the biggest single mistake we made in the Kerry campaign.”
Devine said that by opting into the system, the Kerry campaign operated on the same budget as President Bush’s reelection campaign but for a longer period of time — 13 weeks to Bush’s eight — because of the timing of the conventions.
“We backed ourselves into a terrible corner,” Devine said.
Devine said the Kerry campaign should have gone up with television ads in August, when the campaign was being hit by outside groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Instead, constrained with a finite amount of money, campaign officials felt like they had to wait until October to start airing ads, when they thought more people would be paying attention.
Political analyst Charlie Cook said Obama could use the specter of independent 527 groups to justify declining public financing.
Steve Murphy, a Democratic strategist who worked for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, agreed. He argued that unless Republicans can guarantee that those groups will not be a factor — an agreement they can’t assure — then “Obama should not let them browbeat him into further disadvantaging himself.”
What’s more, Democrats say, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has far outpaced its Democratic counterparts. After January, the RNC reported more than $22 million cash on hand to the Democrats’ $3 million.
Obama ducked the question when asked Tuesday night, saying only that if he is able to secure the nomination, he would then like to sit down with McCain and come up with a system that is fair to both of them.{mospagebreak}
David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, repeated that refrain Wednesday morning on a conference call with reporters.
“We will sit down with the McCain campaign and go through this,” Plouffe said.
{mosads}Plouffe, Devine and other Democrats say Obama can make the argument that his campaign is, in a sense, being publicly financed. After it announced it had received its 1 millionth donation Wednesday morning, with more than 90 percent of them from small donors, the campaign could be in a position to say it is being publicly financed.
“We’ve funded this campaign at the grassroots level,” Plouffe said.
Devine added that the grassroots feel to the campaign allows Obama to say that he has taken a different approach to raising money.
“Obama [has] begun to establish a new way of raising money that’s outside the parameters of the old way of fundraising as we knew it,” Devine said.
Devine and Murphy said Obama can also use the argument to highlight McCain’s troubles with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over public funds and start to set the terms of the debate.
“This is an opportunity for him to stand up and tell Sen. McCain that McCain’s not dictating the rules in the campaign,” Devine said. “I would submit that this is an excellent topic for debate.”
Murphy took a similar view, arguing that McCain is not in a position to successfully target Obama for breaking any promises, given the questions surrounding McCain’s loan agreement and the debate over whether he decided in good faith to accept public matching funds for the primary season.
“I don’t see how McCain can get any political high ground,” Murphy said.
For its part, the McCain campaign does not seem ready to concede that high ground.
Crystal Benton, a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign, said Wednesday afternoon that while McCain’s loan agreement was “legal, ethical and proper,” Obama is clearly trying to break his promise.
“Of course that’s what the Democrats are trying to do; they know the real news here is that Sen.
Obama is trying to back out of his pledge to accept public financing,” Benton said.
John Siegal, a Democratic campaign finance attorney in New York City and an advocate of public financing, said there is no evidence that there is “political detriment” for not accepting public funding.
“The hard cold fact is that those of us who would like to see public financing of campaigns have demonstrated no ability to impose a political price on people who don’t participate,” Siegal said.