I was out to dinner with two political friends of mine this past Saturday night and I wound up codifying a belief that I’ve had since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporate money flowing relatively unchecked into political campaigns: money will always be a part of politics. So, the only way to combat it is to make money itself irrelevant.
The way this can be accomplished is by creating the conditions where it does not matter if one spends one to possibly five billion dollars during a campaign, note that this figure is before the special interests get involved. Through either scheduling, or media restrictions, or other means unknown or unstated at this time, the conditions need to be set so that any ungodly sum of money is taken off the table when it comes to any election.
I manage digital projects for a living and there quickly gets to be a point where throwing more bodies at a problem does not generate positive results. Twelve coders working in parallel cannot complete a relatively short term goal most often. To complete the task, you want two coders to sync and be left alone for a week or so to bang it out. The same must be true for campaigns and their cash – they need to have negative results for throwing more money at the problem. If this happens, then maybe we’ll start to see our political discourse and system reformed in a way that sticks for a good bit of time.