Campaign Finance: A Sad Commentary on America

I’m ambivalent about the recent Supreme Court ruling declaring the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act unconstitutional and removing limits on the amount of money corporations can spend to finance political advertisements. I’m not looking forward to an unlimited flood of hyperbolic, sensational, barely truthful television commercials leading up to the next election. Yet, I’ve never been able to reconcile in my mind how McCain-Feingold wasn’t a harness on free speech.

I’m most distressed, however, by what the uproar says about America and Americans. The arguments both for and against unrestrained campaign ad spending rest on the presumption that, collectively, Americans are too lazy, too apathetic to effectively inform themselves about important issues and where respective candidates stand on those issues.

It is perhaps paradoxical that, the more free access we have to essentially unlimited information, the more woefully ignorant we are about the basic facts of important issues. Instead of embracing our rights and responsibilities as citizens, educating ourselves on matters that affect us, we immerse ourselves in Face Book and American Idol, relinquishing our critical thinking to increasingly-biased (in one direction or the other), agenda-driven mass media—an enterprise which seems perfectly pleased with its progress toward the complete dumbing down of America.

If the aforementioned condition were not true, if Americans took it upon themselves to get smart on issues and candidates, the whole issue of campaign finance would be largely moot. At the very least, it would force advertisements to address issues objectively and intelligently.

We all complain about the way campaigns are run, how they are financed. Why? We’re just getting exactly what we’re asking for.