WurfWhile

I’m guessing that former 14th Congressional Republican Candidate Rudy Clai was pretty emotional in his decision to drop out of the primary. It might explain the incoherence in Rudy Clai’s “open letter” that puzzled OneMan (and me for that matter).

What I got out of Rudy Clai’s letter was the problem of money in politics. Rudy’s right, money (or rather the lack of huge amounts of it) disqualifies candidates who otherwise might be the “best” by any other reasonable standard. It’s not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing. Rudy Clai and it looks like Republican Geneva Mayor Kevin Burns are likely disqualified from serious contention in the 14th congressional primary because of money, as are Democrats John Laesch and Jotham Stein. It isn’t right - and it isn’t good for us or our democratic political system. The only way to fix it is through some sort of public financing of elections. Some people don’t like the idea of the spending the money - but I view it as paying up front what the public tends to pay on the back end in the current political system. Think about it. How honest is a system that asks people to pay ten times or even higher multiples of a job’s salary (campaign costs) in order to get the job (political office)? For any other occupation you’d say that a job candidate that did that was “crazy.” In today’s politics we honor those big-spending candidates with the term “viable.”