Opinion: Money changes everything

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In more than 20 years as a journalist in Pittsburgh, I used to listen with fascination to strange tales from the political subculture of Pennsylvania’s other metropolis: Philadelphia. Candidates for statewide office from the western part of the state would confide in our editorial board that “it’s like another world over there.”

One feature of that world was the practice of providing campaign workers with copious amounts of “street money” to boost voter turnout. Cash sometimes changed hands on Election Day in Pittsburgh, too, but, as with murder rates, the Steel City was a piker compared to the City of Brotherly Love.

Now the cost of doing political business in Philly is tripping up Sen. Barack Obama. According to a Times report, Obama is balking at disbursing dollars to party faithful, a decision that could save the Obama campaign as much as $500,000 on April 22, the day of the atypically important Pennsylvania primary, while costing him an undetermined number of votes.

Obama’s priggishness about street money contrasts with the situation ethics he has displayed on the question of accepting public financing –- and spending limits –- if he is the Democratic nominee. As the Times pointed out in an editorial last month, Obama promised to accept public financing if the Republican nominee did. After John McCain agreed to that deal, the Obama campaign began to waffle.

Now Obama is arguing that his campaign has created “a parallel public financing system where the American people decide if they want to support a campaign they can get on the Internet and finance it, and they will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign that has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and the powerful.” Parallel universe is more like it.

If private Internet fundraising can be repackaged as public financing, so can street money for mercenary campaign “loyalists.” As George Costanza might say, it’s financing and it’s handed out in public ... so it’s public financing.