Money Can't Buy Me Love...

Turns out, it can't buy a preferred election result either.
(That's still a good thing, right?)

No matter if the ball didn't bounce Russ Feingold's way this time around, at least we can't blame it on gobs and gobs of money unfairly influencing the race:

Most prominently, he battled his colleagues to overhaul the campaign finance system; the resulting law, passed in 2002, bore his name and that of Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican (who won re-election Tuesday). After being eroded for years, the McCain-Feingold Act was gutted this year by the Supreme Court, opening the way for millions of dollars from outside anonymous groups to gush into campaigns — at least $4 million in Wisconsin, virtually all of it against Mr. Feingold, 57, or for his opponent, Ron Johnson, 55, a wealthy Republican businessman.

Mr. Feingold rejected such money, as he had his entire career, but analysts said that probably had little to do with his loss.

“Independents deserted Democrats, period,” said Ken Goldstein, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “This was not about Feingold’s record or the money or the advertising. It was about the anger of independents at the status quo.”

Still, others saw the flow of unregulated money as an added dimension to the narrative, in which Mr. Feingold was “hoist on his own petard,” said Mordecai Lee, who was first elected to the State Senate with Mr. Feingold in 1982 and is now a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

“Because his good-government streak and his push for changes in the campaign finance system had no political constituency,” Mr. Lee said, “they led to the lawsuit that opened up the floodgates.”

As it happens, Mr. Feingold raised and spent more money than Mr. Johnson, at least as of mid-October. In fact, their arms race led to what appeared to be the most expensive Senate race in Wisconsin history, topping out at more than $35 million.

Mr. Feingold had raised $18.2 million and spent $16.2 million by the middle of last month, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Mr. Johnson raised $12.8 million, and spent $10.5 million, pumping in more than $8.2 million of his own money.

Mr. Feingold has served in the Senate for 18 years and was seeking his fourth term.

It really is too bad that the press is covering this Citizens United Constitutional opinion so much differently than all the unpopular others handed down over the years -- where we're told to check back tears and swallow if we don't like the results so much, because the Court is the Court, and legally what it says goes, no matter how much you might disagree with either the legal reasoning or the moral outcome (see Roe v. Wade).

The First Amendment doesn't restrict the speech of rich people, and their organizations, whether we like it or not. It doesn't say, "People are allowed to express any and all opinions... but only up to a certain dollar amount. Then: no more."

Nope: the Constitution is stronger and more confident than our most fearful editorialists, even in these scary, scary times.

Let It ALL in, the First Amendment says. Buy all the opinion time you can afford, and if the Congress unites -- as they did under (at the time) party mavericks Feingold and McCain -- to pass unconstitutional legislation that unfairly limits those protected First Amendment rights?

Strike it down, of course.

Had nothing to do with Old Media v. New, and who has a monopoly interest in setting up monetary limits on advertising messages. The idea is: it all gets worked out in the Marketplace of Ideas. No bailouts. No special protections. No playing favorites.

So if Feingold lost,
it wasn't because he was outspent. Wasn't because outsider money drowned out his messages, because he spent even more than his opponent.

I have full confidence in the American people to turn off what they see as bad messages, or distortions, even in the slickest PR campaigns that surely cost a pretty fortune.