"Of course, the downside of the American culture is that the way politics gets financed (with the Obama campaign as a positive exception) seems a bit sketchy at

"Of course, the downside of the American culture is that the way politics gets financed (with the Obama campaign as a positive exception) seems a bit sketchy at times. Not that our own system is preferable, because we've taken it to the other extreme and have our government pay for the election campaigns of our politicians in order to avoid the suggestion of political debt to private benefactors." You are correct that Obama financed his campaign in a way that was significantly different than any other U.S. presidential campaign in three decades. However, I think that you misunderstand how our presidential campaigns are financed, and especially how Obama's was financed differently. For decades (ending with Obama), our presidential campaigns were funded by a mix of public and private money. In return for agreeing to additional restrictions and oversight on their fundraising and spending, presidential candidates in the U.S. are given government-provided funds to match contributions. The advantage to this is obvious: loads of extra cash. The disadvantages are that the candidate's campaign spending is subject to additional rules and regulations, and his total campaign fund is effectively capped by the accompanying restrictions. However, this limit is so high that for most of the program's existence (it began in 1976) there was no practical way for a presidential candidate to raise more money on his own than he could by taking the matching public dollars. Obama changed that: he refused public campaign financing and directly raised more money than allowed for by the limit on public financing. Now that he has shown it to be possible, it is likely that every major-party presidential nominee from now on will follow his example and refuse public campaign financing. This means that their spending will no longer be subject to the full scope of rules which previous campaigns operated under. If you believe that wholly public and wholly private financing are undesirable extremes and that some sort of middle ground would be preferable, then you should consider the Obama campaign to be a negative exception, not positive: he took U.S. presidential campaign finance away from an intermediate state and drove it straight to the extreme of wholly private financing. Personally, I was never a fan of public campaign financing and am happy to see it made obsolete, but if I'm reading you correctly you find wholly private financing to be "a bit sketchy."