You cannot talk about campaign finance today without mentioning the SCOTUS Citizens United case and the advantage it gives the minority party, the Republicans.

The extent to which you ignore this fact, is the extent that you are basically lying to support the extremely well funded minority party which uses that financial leverage to win an election by the money alone.

The only thing left is to actually directly pay voters for their support. Under this SCOTUS that would be ruled 5-4 as free speech, too.

Somebody's got to fix this before it is too late, if it is not already.

A billion bucks each side. It figures to about $150 a voter. $1000 per voter if you just pay the 10,000,000 undecided.

How do I sign up for my share?

PS: I've already decided.

Instead of spending millions/billions in advertising that may or not be seen, they might as well start throwing money at voters.

GOP money would go a long way towards paying the bills right about now. Of course, I'd still vote democrat.

it's when you say something like 'the democrat party' which is putting it down. Good grief! even FDR and Truman said 'make sure you vote democrat on election day.'

Even though Citizens United damn near makes that legal there is no guarantee the person paid to vote a certain way would actually vote that way in the voting booth. Maybe they'll go after the secret ballot next?

You lay your money down, spin the wheel, and maybe you win. But if you don't put the money on the felt, you can't win.

The ballots will always be secret. The protocols are simple to ensure that. Nobody buying votes would have to check that. Sure, many will take the money and vote otherwise. But, that's okay, because you don't need everybody.

It is a numbers game. That's why the Repubs do shit like Voter ID. They are the minority party and this is what they have to do to win.

into the booth under the guise of aiding the voter. This can only happen if there is no Dem worker to challenge/discover the cheating.

That if it comes to a battle of dollar to dollar... we will lose. This is not to say that money isn't necessary to run a campaign. Of course it is. We simply can't financially compete with the opposition. So we must find ways in which to be more clever with what funds we do have.

It is very troubling that the campaign is so low on cash. Looks like I'll have to rummage around the house for whatever I can spare, sell it and make a contribution of my own. It won't be more than a couple hundred dollars, I sure as hell can't match the spending power of someone with a decent job or a great crook like Romney.

I'll do what I can, because of how important this election is. It seems to me though, that this IS overspending. Four hundred million dollars? The amount boggles my mind. How many jobs could we have created with it? How many college educations paid for? How many Americans could we insure? How much good would it have done for research?

All the same... I suppose this overspending is necessary, when you have an opponent like Romney. When we have the Super PACs to worry about. It's still sick. Just damn sick.

Obama's working to help destroy public education, whether he really gets that or not, and he's not getting a dime of this public high school teacher's paycheck. His and RMoney's positions on education are almost identical. If he wants money and help from teachers, he needs to do a 180, dump Duncan, and start listening to us and not Bill Gates.

Obama is running more effective ads, have different messages targeted to demographics and locations. Romney just keeps running the same ads, hate, economy is bad, but has no solutions, just vague platitudes.

Ads can only do so much if have a flawed product. Remember the old dog food story. After millions of ads, the dog food was still not selling, turns out the dogs did not eat it. Romney is that dog food.

The debates
The VP pick
The convention speeches and speakers
All these will have greater impact then ads.
I believe team Obama will ace the 3.
Team Romney will gaffe and have idiotic speakers and speeches
The VP pick will be a dud, boring white guy
Obama will make Romney start singing at the debates, he will gaffe, and regaffe, retrogaffe, his way through the debates.

No job=no income=no campaign contributions.

Obama didn't create this depression, but neither did I.