A very good friend of mine is an expert on governmental practices and an advocate of public financing. He is disappointed that Barack Obama opted to pursue private rather than public financing for the 2008 general election. I support the same public financing goal my friend supports, but do not believe it to be workable in this campaign with the existing rules. Here's why:

1. The stakes for our nation. -- We're not in a normal time. We're in a time of criminal behavior on a massive scale led by the Bush-Cheney administration and the Republicans: war crimes, torture, war profiteering, civil liberties trampled, world health and environment imminently imperiled, economy trashed, international contempt for America. Under these conditions the stakes are too high to focus on tidy process to the potential sacrifice of necessary results. I am reminded of the World War II movie, "The Bridge on the River Kwai", where the allied prisoners are asked to build a bridge that will aid the war efforts of the Japanese. The British colonel (Alec Guinness) is willing to do so as long as the proper protocol is followed, where the American officer (William Holden) sees the bigger picture of disastrous consequences.

2. What's the purpose of public financing? -- It's to counter the influence of the rich and powerful, usually corporate, interests that have co-opted legitimate public priorities in favor of their special interests. Is Obama's form of private financing set up to enable corporate lobbyists? Not at all. Obama's model is a new - and legitimate - form of public financing, overwhelmingly based on small individual contributions. See the following link for further discussion of this issue: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/obamas-opt-out-of-public_b_108240.html

3. Republican gaming the current public financing system. -- The Republicans have a strategy to have their public financing cake and eat it too. They realize the sentiment has been shifting to public financing and know they have been tainted (under Bush-Cheney, DeLay, Abramoff, et al) with dirty lobbyist money. And as a result, McCain has not had the same pull for donations to his campaign that Obama has. The Republicans have opted for a clever Plan B: starve the McCain campaign from private contributions but collect $84 million in public financing for it, then work to raise massive unregulated bucks for the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the "527" special interest groups, using those funds to launch a smear campaign against Obama, his wife, "liberals" in general, etc.

Let me share an example from personal experience that will illustrate how the above Republican plan will be manipulated to work for them:

In my former career with a local city government, we had a cultural grants program which was always subject to political interference, usually for groups with political ties but lacking artistic merit. In order to counter a potential capitulation to lower quality, I established a panel review process with qualified artistic peers from diverse sectors, the credibility of which was hard to reject by elected representatives. Many of the more ethical politicians were grateful for the deflection of inappropriate lobbying. Some of the more underhanded elected representatives, however, were not. The system worked well for many years, but when the department came under the control an intensely political director, he had the difficult dilemma of wanting to appear to be merit-based while also wanting to enjoy the role of godfather ("decider") with its enhanced power and influence. So he used another "special" fund, initially set up as a small fund for festival management, growing it over time to a comparable funding base to the cultural grants program. This slush fund supported non-peer-reviewed grants and took care of the politically connected as well as other interests. Voila: ethics in one program, perks in the other. Everybody wins, regardless of need or merit. This is the model, on a massive scale, that the Republicans have figured out with their publicly financed cake and their privately financed RNC and "527" meals.

Yes, public financing is a great goal when we can put our regulatory arms around it entirely, but as long as the loopholes exist, it is not worth a plug nickel to effectively clean up the election.