That's A Lot of Coin

Congressman Mark Udall has announced that he has raised $1.1 million dollars in the last three months for his bid to win the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Wayne Allard. To that we say keep up the good work, Congressman.



This news follows on the heels of news that Jared Polis, Senator Joan Fitz-Gerald, and Will Shafroth combined raised over $1 million in their efforts to replace Congressman Udall in CD-2.



On the one had, we think this is wonderful news. It is evidence that vision and message put forth by Democrats has real resonance with people across Colorado.



On the other hand, the impact that money has on the electoral system is a bit disconcerting. It takes a good deal of time for four people to raise over $2 million in three months, especially with caps on donations. While we think that money has a place in politics (it is one decent gauge of how much support a candidate can muster), it is interesting to think about how much time the candidates spent raising money when they could have been studying the issues and improving upon their capacity to make sound public policy.



Given that the Supreme Court has reaffirmed that money will always be a part of politics, it may be time to begin to seriously visit the question of whether publicly funded elections are a viable option. Such a mechanism, or one similar, would have the effect of disentangling candidates from the money chase - though, admittedly, not entirely.

While being able to diminish the influence that money has on politics is a noble aspiration, a more specific goal ought to be to guarantee that those that decide to sacrifice their time and effort to run for public office be able to make such a sacrifice not while they are shaking donor's hands but while they are pouring over policy briefs in order to make themselves better legislators. We suspect that this is what candidates would prefer to do anyway, and we as citizens and voters would likely benefit from more well informed candidates and legislators.

The obvious question for us, the genreation to needs to fix a broke system, is how we go about doing that exactly.