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Comment by tomkin | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of concern for integration with API, hosting, etc. but what I don't see is disgust. Disgust because to become president of the US, you must participate in this monumental financial circus of who spends what. Is this what people want? To know the best candidate will need to raise over a billion dollars to compete? Campaign costs should be in line with needs. Remember when Color got $40 mil for doing basically what other startups manage to do with a couple thousand dollars? Why would HN readers champion this kind of spending? The reasons are probably in line with the SuperPAC reasoning, which is "in order to change the game, you must play within the game's rules". Sure. But when do you say enough is enough? In Canada, our candidates spend on their campaign, but dollar-for-dollar, they are getting more done with less money. Somehow.

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Or you could view this as a fascinating case study regardless of all that. I'm personally horrified that Obama got re-elected but this post is cool as hell and I'm absolutely fascinated by this work and appreciate that Kyle took a few hours to compose all of this and share it.

Kyle and the team who worked on the campaign are awesome. And if I could have voted for Obama, I would have. My criticism isn't to do with any specific person. The campaign spending just seems out of line with other countries.

Not to defend the current campaign status quo, but when comparing the US to Canada it is worth pointing out the population of the US is ten times that of Canada.

True, but my problem is that democracy is supposed to be about everyone, and when you start eliminating people based on their propensity to generate millions of dollars you eliminate a lot of potentially great leaders.

If a national candidate cannot be organized and inspirational enough to generate donations, how can they hope to succeed as president? I would argue that fundraising is much easier than, say, passing a major piece of legislation.

In a rational society, yes. If you find one, let me know.

The US 2012 election is expected to have cost over $6 billion when all is said and done.[1] Canada's election cost $45 million.[2] The difference is 90% less per captia. Americans spend a lot more proportionally.

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/10/2012-election-spendi... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in_...

I just like to consider it a stimulus package that comes once every four years, paid for privately by America's wealthier residents.

During the campaign some TV news person tweeted something like 'A billion dollars in contributions, but where does it all go?'.

I replied, 'To pay the salaries of you and your colleagues.'

It's the circle of life.

If you think anyone on the campaign was being paid that handsomely you should look at our FEC reports. I took a 15% pay cut to work twice as many hours and so did all of my colleagues. The money went to where it was most needed and the proof of that is that we won the election.

My point is that a large chunk of that billion dollars went to buy TV ads, which in turn helps pay the large salaries of TV newspeople who question where the money goes.

Ah! Sorry, misunderstood. In that case you are not wrong :)

The Obama campaign spent less, got more air time, and did it through leveraging technology to optimize their ad buys. Honestly, it should have gone into the salaries of people like Kyle Rush and the hard working dedicated technology workers for more artisinal keyboards.

  It's the Circle of Life
  And it moves us all
  Through despair and hope
  Through faith and love
  Till we find our place
  On the path unwinding
  In the Circle
  The Circle of Life

/helpful

A solution is to try to find ways to change the game.

An independent-reasoning educated populace is one way to fortify against manipulation.

Reply written in the NYC Public Library reading room. This inscription is out front:

"The City of New York has erected this building to be maintained forever as a free library for the use of the people. On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27954/27954-h/27954-h.htm

Wow +1000 on this if I could.....

Although Canada has been blessed with a twenty-year streak of good federal governance, I wouldn't say Canadian politicians get more done with their campaign spending.

I would say that their spending is strictly capped at the national and local level by Elections Canada, which means the major political parties simply aren't allowed to get into an advertising arms race. Without the caps - who knows?

Practical, but that sort of tight restriction on free speech is a very, very hard sell down here.

For me, being a citizen and being able to become president under fair rules is important. The whole idea of democracy is that you get to elect a leader and that leader could even be you. You might be a good leader - the best even, but it won't mean a whole lot of you can't generate 1 billion in campaign contributions. Something about that doesn't seem right. Plutocracy is more appropriate - and I don't mean that in a sarcastic way. Sincerely. How is it democratic that a smart, progressive, informed person can't run against someone less informed?

The scarce resource in being a successful politican isn't really money, and it certainly isn't being smart, progressive, or informed. It's the ability to persuade people. Regardless, I think the idea that anyone could be president is kind of sweet but not very relevant. Most people can't or don't want to be elected to president of their high school class, let alone anything bigger. Democracy simply means that you get to vote, not that anyone could be president.

Add to that a willingness to deal with the absurdities of running for and holding public office...that may be the scarcest resource of all.

Canada only has 35 million people. That's fewer than California.

This misses a key point, which is that the Obama campaign relied heavily on small donations from _individuals_ in contrast with the heavily superpac funded Romney campaign which pulled from a small set of extremely wealthy donors (admittedly conjecture based on being an avid political news junkie). So, we're talking about crowd-sourcing a president; this is an encouraging direction, even if one finds the overall amount spent to be distressing.

Obama had the same superpac corporate support that Romney did. The whole emails asking people to donate $3-$5 was to bring his average donation rate down.

source?

http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance/independe...

^ would seem to indicate otherwise.

It seems to me that disappointment in the current state of campaign finance reform and interest in how a campaign dealt with the current reality are not mutually exclusive.

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