It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

by Stuart Stevens

Every presidential candidate stuck to that system until 2008, when Barack Obama, after routinely pledging to accept federal funding, realized how much money he could raise and decided to reject federal funding. John McCain stayed in the system with the result that he had $83 million for his campaign and Obama had more than $300 million for his. As is always the case with campaign finance reforms, once the system was broken, it proved impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, and subsequent candidates rejected public funding. Today some defend the decision by then senator Obama to blow up the system, insisting it was necessary to cope with the large amount of money Republicans could raise after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allowed contributions from corporations to be treated the same as individual donations—an explanation that makes no sense, because the ruling was two years after the 2008 campaign. The ending of the federal funding system is, in my view, one of the most negative long-term legacies of the Obama administration.