Funding Presidential Campaigns
Money, Competition, and Fairness in American Politics
The history of campaign reform in America is one of a series of reactions to scandals, corruption, mismanagement, and undue influence of wealthy interests. Often, such solutions lose their effectiveness as times change and new weaknesses appear, and are exploited, in the system. Laws passed in 1974 and 2002 that sought to remedy some of these problems for presidential election campaigns are now being reassessed for their relevance in today’s political environment. In the aftermath of Watergate, when President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign was found to have illegally received hundreds of thousands of dollars from some of the country’s largest…
