John Edwards and our money

At the Raleigh News & Observer’s Editors’ Blog executive editor for news John Dresher yesterday posted John Edwards carries on.

It begins:

John Edwards invested a huge amount of time and energy in Iowa only to finish a distant second (38 percent to 30 percent) Thursday night to Barack Obama in the Iowa caucuses. Peter Francia, a political science professor at East Carolina University, told The N&O’s Rob Christensen that Edwards is in big trouble. Read that story here.

The rest of Drescher’s post is here.

Nowhere in it does Drescher mention that besides spending a huge amount of time and energy on his campaign, Edwards is also spending public money to finance it.

This excerpt from a Sept. 28, 2007 Washington Post story:

…Edwards and his top advisers said they examined at length the question of how public financing would affect their chances in the primaries.

Senior adviser Joe Trippi said yesterday that they concluded they could be in a stronger position with the public money providing a potential infusion of more than $10 million in January that "nobody expected we would have."

Trippi, who said the campaign would report raising about $7 million in the third quarter [of 2007] and having between $8 million and $9 million in cash, discounted concerns about the spending limits.

He said there were so many exemptions to the restrictions that the limits were not a serious concern. …

So the multi-millionaire trial lawyer who’s just built himself a 30,000 sq. ft. house “carries on” his campaign spending taxpayers money to do it.

And Edwards needn’t worry about restrictions resulting from his use of public money; they’re not a serious concern.

If you supported public financing of political campaigns, did you ever think tax dollars would go to support people like John Edwards? Or that campaign advisors would have no serious concerns regarding restrictions on the use of public funds for campaigns?

Trying to find a bright side in all of this, I suppose we can all be grateful the public financing law doesn’t include a provision requiring us to also fund Edwards’ mortgage payments.