Obama's Huge Haul Should End This Fight

Others note that the Republican National Committee is outspending the Democratic National Committee. This is true, but even with that difference included, Obama is still outspending McCain by a sizeable margin.

Obviously, given a choice, Obama thinks that it is more important that he get his message out to the American people as often as possible than that he and McCain spend an equal amount of money. And so do his supporters. September's amazing fundraising totals will hardly persuade Obama backers to start making contributions to McCain in order to show their commitment to equality.

This suggests that partisanship, rather than principle, is what drives most support for campaign finance reform. When one side is being outspent, its partisans naturally want to limit the fundraising of the other side. But if we really are concerned about "fairness," the best approach is probably to remove restrictions on fundraising altogether, rather than limit the speech of those who are raising money successfully.

Campaign finance laws never affect all candidates equally. For example, the one area where McCain has an advantage this cycle is the fundraising success of the RNC versus the DNC. But because of the byzantine campaign finance rules (for which he bears considerable responsibility), the Arizona senator cannot take full advantage of that edge. Due to the rules, the RNC can only use a portion of those funds to campaign for its presidential nominee. This is illogical and, this year, increases the inequality in campaign spending.

We should consider it a healthy thing when Americans support their political beliefs with their dollars. What we see in this election is that contributions don't really cause "corruption" and that we don't really want the government deciding who has spoken too much and who has not spoken enough. If Obama's fundraising shows us the emptiness of the arguments for campaign finance "reform," he will have done us a great service, in spite of himself.

Bradley A. Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, is a professor of law at Capital University and chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics.