Barack Obama and John McCain seem to locked into a sort of awkward game-theory romance on taking public funds for their (presumptive) presidential campaigns.

McCain: Obama Should Take Public Funding

Decades of advertising-driven political campaigns have created an arms-race scenario that long ago blew past logical extremes and is now tottering around in the illogical extremes of 100s of millions of dollars of candidate’s money being spent each time there’s a US presidential race. No one who unilaterally scales back their campaign financing expects to win — a seperate co-evolutionary process between media and the public have resulted in newspapers, TV and radio which are devoid of the candidate’s positions, just their polls and horse-race commentary. Consequently expensive paid advertising, terrible medium that it may be for communicating political ideas, is the main channel candidates have to distribute their message to people who aren’t already converts.

There is a bi-lateral disarmarment option. Nowadays, a candidate can opt to take public funding for their campaign. It’s free money, from the taxpayers (I think), but the disadvantage is it isn’t nearly as much as a US presidential candidate can potentially raise through private donations. Not nearly enough, in other words, to beat a privately funded opponent. And if they take the public funds, they can’t use their private funds to campaign on.

On the other hand, private funds come with a price. The bulk of private donations come from corporations and other rich actors, who expect loyalty for their money. Whether that channels through lobbyists or not, the sensible name for this interaction is “bribery” and “corruption”. We’ve gotten so used to it that we don’t see it that way, but whatever, it is. US politicians these days are self-selected to be comfortable with the bribery/corruption way of doing things, but both McCain and Obama have made noise about campaign finance reform and getting out of the lobbyist pocket. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that when somebody looked into it, they were each the candidate with the fewest former lobbyists in their top campaign staff, for their respective parties.

So it’s just about a prisoner’s dilemma. The best possible option, in terms of total payoff, is for both of them to go for the public funds. And both of them have speculated charmingly about it in public, mostly back before they thought they had a clear shot at being their party’s nominee. But the best option for either one of them is to stick to private funds and have the other guy go public. Then the one who stays private can advertise their way into the whitehouse and lounge around drinking magnums of Jefferson’s champagne long into the night while speculating languidly about how to use their enormous new power to make sure they future is lobbyist free. But according to Nash’s beautiful mind, they’re going to end up both having to take the private funds, working hard to gather them up, being owned by their donors, and fighting a likewise privately-funded opponent. Because in the prisoner’s dilemma, you have to assume that the other guy is going to bail on you.

Except you don’t of course, it just usually ends up that way. So how can these two avoid that fate? It seems like they’re trying to collude together, in public, without committing to anything, by way of campaign speech soundbites and public news releases. Somebody help these guys out. We need a binding, enforceable mechanism where one can say “I promise that if the other guy promises to take public funds, I will take public funds”, and then they can use that as a holier-than-thou until the other guy makes the same commitment, but if the other guy doesn’t, no skin off nobody’s back. And hey, just maybe the other guy will make that commitment, and we’ll have the first publicly funded US presidential race, and we can write another chapter in the story of the US’s inexorable move to democracy.

update: I remembered that wrong. McCain actually had the most lobbyists working for his campaign. Out of everybody. He is indeed big on campaign finance reform, but it seems to be an open question whether his ideas of reform are positive or just bad.