The campaign contribution flap could be settled by enacting a statewide law that could be contained in a single sentence: Spending by a candidate in a single campaign shall not exceed the greater of $10,000 or twice the salary paid for the office that is the subject of the campaign. (The $10,000 cap is for offices that pay no salary.)
The only real problem, of course, is that the politicians who want to spend the money won’t go for it, and their approval would be necessary to make it law. Beyond that, there are many benefits.
It’s simple and doesn’t get tied up in a Byzantine process of tracking contributors who no longer matter. We can let a single person “buy” the campaigns of a dozen candid-ates if he wants to because the cost of campaigning would now be small enough to attract a lot of competition.
There would still be enough money. A state senator making $48,000 would have $96,000 to spend, enough to get the word out, but the candidate would have to put in more sweat equity and be more careful about the words that got out. The blizzard of mass media propaganda would become wasteful, and the candidate would have to depend on how much the voters were interested in his or her agenda and how much they were willing to spread the word. Not a bad thing in a democracy.
Probably best of all, an elected candidate would be less bound to party warlords or contributors, and the duties of office could become more the function of constituent need than of money.
