Not maxed out

I touched on Barack Obama's public finance dilemma yesterday. One more thing: Since he's raising his money in small dollar amounts from hundreds of thousands of contributors, why is the democratization of campaign funding even an issue? He has already done that, following the groundbreaking example of Howard Dean.

I don't know what it says that Hillary Clinton didn't learn Dean's lesson and is now scrambling to catch up. But Bill Clinton and Terry McAuliffe emphasized large wealthy donors to Democrats, and the politics of their period showed it.

While the economy of the 1990s is attractive, I don't want to return to the politics of that decade.