Actually, anyone being honest would have done differently. However, it seems nobody expects Obama to be honest.

Don't worry about McCain. He may not be able to raise the millions he needs for the election but there are always the 527s who can raise and spend as much as they can to "swiftboat" Obama.

The unvarnished truth is that you can't be swiftboated if you are telling the truth and open the records that show that you are telling the truth. John Kerry never did the latter. The implication that every single veteran who served with Kerry and discounted his tales of heroism is a liar is somewhat fatuous.

Obama may yet be "swiftboated"if by that term you mean, "has revealed something he doesn't want to talk about from his past."

BenK --

Being honest does not require that a person be inflexible or unadaptable to changes in circumstance that change what is the right thing to do. Obama did the right thing. Millions of people contributed to his campaign -- millions of people are personally invested, finacially as well as emotionally and in time terms, in Obama's campaign. I am one of those. I would have been offended if Obama had not respected by contribution by refusing to let it count for anything just because he said, before he realized how much real support he has and how much it means to people to be allowed to contribute to his campaign in a meaningful way, that he would use public money and not use the help of his own supporters.

Besides, I don't see how anyone can be criticized for spending private money rather than public money. Insisting that public money be spent when private money is available is the reverse of everything Reagan Democrats and Republicans are supposed to stand for.

Beathan

Trap --

You are buying into long discounted rhetoric about Kerry. Was Kerry the hero of his early press-clippings? No, he was a show-boat captain. However, he was not the worst of the showboat captains and, more importantly, he was not just a showboat captain. There is real heroism in his real record -- as most people who served with him would tell you (and as several have told me).

Further, the irony of "Swiftboat Veterans for Truth" is that there was nothing true about the name at all. With the exception of a couple hacks brought along as window-dressing, the members of that notorious 527 were (for the most part) not veterans, had not (for the most part) ever seen a swiftboat, and (without exception -- even the hacks) were not interested in Truth.

Beathan

See where SWVT are today.

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Beathan: Nor did I say all of the members of that 527 were veterans -- I said there were veterans quoted in those ads, and that it was fatuous to call all of them liars.

What I think is clear from the actual record is that little Kerry did could be considered heroic. His wounds were basically treatable with bandaids and mercurocrome, and he was only in the "combat" environment for three months -- a quarter of a full tour -- before volunteering himself out of that environment.

My opinion is that Kerry could have diffused the matter by opening the appropriate military records, something he refused to do. Why? I think it was because they contained his college grades, and when they were ultimately revealed, his grades weren't quite as good as the current "idiot" president's grades.

The real point, however, is that most of us have done something in our life that we aren't proud of. If we are running for public office or live in the public eye, the best thing we can do about these past incidents is to make a clean breast of them and move on. One of my favorite public figures today is the actor/comedian Tim Allen. It is not that I think he is very talented or funny that draws my admiration -- it is the fact that when he was a young man he spent three years in prison for dealing drugs, and he has never made any attempt to cover that up or mitigate it in the public eye. His attitude has always been, "I did what I did. It was wrong. I did prison time for it, and I wish I hadn't committed the crime." (I did see an interview in which he was thinking of requesting a pardon to allow him to vote). The point is, by doing this, he has made that black mark against him a useless weapon -- it can never damage his box office earnings, or be used as a smear against his public image. You can't blackmail someone over something that isn't a secret.

If I were Obama's campaign managers, I'd be scouring his past for troublesome ex-girl (or boy) friends, evidence that his drug use was more than experimental, and any other mark against him, so that I could make it public before my enemies did so. The web site he has established to counter smears will never be as effective as not giving his opponents something with which to smear him.

I would agree with you if Obama was one of those people who realized that dumping public funds into the politician trough seems like a bad idea. However, he has been more than supportive of public funding - he has put it forward as a cure for what ails politics. He has also promised to use it and be constrained by it. Are we to seriously think that he can't run a decent campaign for the better part of $100 million?

That amount of money subverts democracy no matter how you paint it. He doesn't need that amount of money to get press attention. Everybody knows his name. So the money is for some other purpose than assisting the election by making the candidates publically visible.

BenK --

If we used a pure public money system, like they have in the UK, the restrictions could work. We have tried to move that way repeatedly -- McCain-Feingold is one such attempt -- but, as the Supreme Court observed in upholding McCain-Feingold, money will find a way. Obama's support for public funding is like his support for single-payor healthcare -- it is a good principle and a good ideal, but we need to get real in the here-and-now and do what is practical because the ideal won't work.

That said, the real problem in the past has been that people of real wealth, like T-Boone Pickens, have been able to dump money into elections through 527s and have used that money to distract, confuse and mislead the voters into supporting candidates who favor the interests of the wealthy class (the top 2-3%) over the rest of us. Internet fundraising has evened this playing field a lot; it is evened it far more than public funding ever did.

The wonderful part of internet fundraising is that it allows the rest of us to contribute small amounts that, in combination, equal the large amounts available from the wealthiest among us. Now, it is true that the wealthiest still have more spending power -- but if they have to commit the old-money sin of spending principal to match the contributions of us little people, I would count that a serious victory.

Public funding both insulates and empowers wealth. Internet funding removes this protection -- and I say, thank God and pass the ammunition. The say of T-Boone Pickens's politics are numbered.

Beathan

First and foremost what a truly publicly funded campaign would mean is that your tax dollars would be used to fund ideas which were anathema to you. This hardly strikes me as the goal of the American system -- force you to pay for political speech with which you disagree.

I want to spend $250 dollars to put a pro-Obama ad in the local newspaper, it's my money spent to promote my viewpoint. If T. Boone Pickens wants to spend $12 million of his own money to support a given candidate, it's his money and his viewpoint. To my mind, this is freedom of choice, freedom of speech, and generally just plain freedom.

The only reason there is anything "wrong" with Obama's political mistake (and ultimately, ditching the public financing system is going to be seen as a mistake) is that he has stressed the need for a more socialized and publicly funded system. This makes it easy to tar him with the brush of hypocrisy.

At least some critics are saying this won't matter because the general public doesn't care how presidential campaigns are financed. I think this critique is wrong for two reasons. The first is that the public is more sophisticated than the pundits expect. The second is that the move has awakened the punditry, and the "chattering class," even those that support Obama, are going to have to acknowledge that this is a flip-flop on his part, and yet another rather cold-eyed political move by someone who is marketing himself as a "next wave" idealist.

This isn't a campaign-ending blunder for Obama -- not ditching Jeffrey Wright sooner is probably going to be the worst mistake in the campaign -- but it is a blunder and its one he's going to have to walk back in some way.

Excuse me, I typed "Jeffrey Wright" when I meant "Jeremiah Wright" -- my mistake.

In the end, I have trouble with the notion that we should socialize 'democracy.' Actually, I'm not a big fan of pure democracy, either, but that's another story for another day.

In the end, the problem I have with Obama's recent move is the hypocrisy. I don't like the socialism of his earlier position, but he tried to tie people's hands by forcing people into the public funding constraints using rhetoric and statements about what he would do, what he thought people should do. Then, when it comes to him winning or losing, he decides to do differently. Apparently, he thinks his winning is such an imporant end that the means are irrelevant. This is a dangerous line of thinking.

As for your pass the ammunition idea - yes, I'm all for the idea that people will put their money where their mouth is. If I wanted a dictatorship, I'd be a big fan of Chavez, Castro, Che, Mao, Stalin, and all the other socialists.