Barack Obama and Public Financing: Counting Angels on a Pinhead

I remember only wisps of the first conversations about the profession of politics I heard as a very young lad.

"It's a dirty, dirty business," I recall one adult saying to my father, as the three of us stood for reasons unremembered in an appropriately grimy print shop (probably non-union). The speaker's words -- and his striking solemnity -- puzzled me, since I had no knowledge of his subject, but they intrigued me even more, for the same reason.

My other earliest memory is that of a voice -- I have no recollection of whose -- of an inventively metaphorical if not profoundly philosophical bent, observing of this vague thing called politics: "It takes a lot of manure to grow a beautiful rose." I sensed his reference was not entirely botanical.

Yesterday, as Barack Obama reneged on his pledge of public financing almost exclusively because he happens to be crushing his opponent in the arena of private financing, those early memories stirred.

Yes, I thought, both gentlemen were correct and likely always will be: Politics, no matter how stylistically "new," was then, is now, and forever will be a dirty, shit-kicking business. 

And yet, I also thought, perhaps he of the horticultural metaphor had made the more important, if not more hopeful, point -- yes, the verbal manure does get deep and the crappy skulduggery even deeper, but what of the consequent policy roses? Are they not, after all, worth it -- if "it" is what it takes?

Long ago I determined that my personality and natural resistance to the deepest of bullshit were suited only to writing about politics and not, God forbid, the actual practice of it. For there is, for example, no way I could stand on my head in front of a video camera and deliver -- sans smirk -- the definitive, upside-down crappola that Mr. Obama delivered to his supporters yesterday via email:

"It's not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections."

But it was, of course, not only an easy decision, it was the absolute easiest. And only a consummate pol comfortable with shooting dirty pool could look straight at you and claim he's saving the village by destroying it.

By now you are likely sensing that I was not, well, 100 percent supportive of Mr. Obama's decision to trash -- sorry, rescue -- his earlier principles. And I have written accordingly in the past.

Nevertheless I am abandoning my objections. After witnessing eight years of the unmitigatedly catastrophic George W. Bush -- and knowing we cannot afford another four -- I am more than willing, at long last, to accept Obama's manure of rank hypocrisy in exchange for the growth of a few pleasant roses.

No, I don't buy the George Will libertarian argument that money is speech, and the more of it in politics the better. No, I don't buy the argument that Obama is "democratizing" the business of campaign finance; the big money is still there -- buying influence -- and more is coming.

And no, I am not pleased by all the progressives who so ardently advocated public financing for so long, only to collapse at the first sign of financial advantage -- and then further argue with the insulting, evasive artfulness of medieval scholasticism that they are not, in fact, collapsing into rank hypocrisy.

No, I don't buy any of that. Let's just face and admit the ugly truth of it: Obama's decision to back out of public financing was a colossally tawdry flip-flop of opportunism, no matter how the Keith Olbermanns of this world wish to spin it.

But you know what? I am willing to suffer the stench -- to openly pitch whatever remaining principles there were on the matter -- if it means the nation's final threat of a John McCain administration will be averted as a result.

If it takes the destruction of the public-financing village to save the larger village itself -- and now don't we sound just like the domestic terrorist-hunting, civil-liberties denying neocons? -- then so be it. Just don't tell me it's not hypocrisy -- and don't tell me there won't be a boomerang price to pay down the road.