A modest proposal

I'm going to break format here for a second. I was listening to This American Life, and they were discussing money and politics. They were doing their best to follow the money and find where it comes from, who it goes to, what effect it has on elections and what effect it has once the election is done.

Off Topic: One of the most surprising things they found is that lobbyists don't hound politicians, politicians hound lobbyists(like a telemarketer hounds senior citizens).

For those with short attention spans: click here

I think that everyone has decided that there's too much money in politics. Even if you don't think it corrupts the process, you have to think, there must be some better use for this money. Imagine if all those millionaires and billionaires were to use that money to fund new businesses(job creators!), or even just donate it to their favorite charity. I'm not really going to argue this point here, but you can if you want to in the comments.

But assuming money is bad for politics, the real problem is, how do you divorce money and politics? Everyone knows it takes a lot of money to run for office. Many congresspeople spend at least some time every day(365 days a year) doing fund-raising. Every attempt at campaign finance reform has tried to control the source, or the expenditure of the money. What if instead, they just cut off money for campaigning for everyone? I mean, maybe in this day and age, with the magic of the internet, we don't need so much money for campaigning, right? I'm about to get radical, and probably infeasible.

What I'm thinking is this: For any given office(senator, representative, city council), there is one campaign. The campaign sets up events, debates, town hall meetings, televised or not[1], depending on the budget, and importance of the office. The campaign has a certain(preferably small) budget, provided by the state, local or federal government. All the candidates for that office are invited to all these events set up by the campaign[2]. The campaign provides equal time at events to each candidate(or equal space if it's a meet and greet), and an equal budget for signage/publicity materials[3].

Candidates are required to qualify by some method. It could be paying a fee(somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000), which they can raise however they wish or maybe by getting enough signatures on a petition[4].

Candidates can use twitter, facebook, or any other free service to get their message across. They can create a website on a space provided by the campaign. They cannot buy any advertising. Premium services can either provide free access to all candidates, or to none.

In short: I propose that no one contributes to political campaigns[5], and that for any one office, there is instead a single budget shared between multiple candidates, with the side effect of prohibiting political ads.

Does that sound crazy? Is there any way to get from here to there?

A few notes:
1. I'm guessing that there would be a lot less politics on the TV. In the age of the internet, maybe that's ok, since you can still get your message out to anyone who wants to hear it. But would this mean less political conversation in our society? or just less work for that guy who does voice overs for attack ads?
2. Who's going to work at the campaigns? What if they aren't impartial? Who do they report to? I'd like their philosophy to be: "My job is to make this the best race for treasurer there ever was. We'll have 10 people at our meet and greets instead of 5(including the candidates)."
3. What if you get 20 candidates who qualify? I guess that just means you split everything into smaller slices, but then how do voters tell that 15 of them are crazy? I guess you have to set the qualifying bar sufficiently high to avoid this, but you also want to set it low enough that grassroots efforts can reach it.
4. One danger of having all the parties in the same place for events: riots, or compromise. Currently, there's a subculture of heckling at political events, but maybe if there was more political mixing... Of course, we could just have separate but equal events...
5. The constitutional argument being that maybe money isn't speech after all, so no one should get to vote with their wallets.