Accentuate the negative

washingtonpost.com: McCain-Feingold. Unfortunately for the public, it created machinery that can do nothing but crank out negative advertising. In his column, Charles Krauthammer nails another one.

"You wanted campaign finance reform. You got campaign finance reform. McCain-Feingold promised to take the money out of politics. If you believed that, you deserve what you got.

And what you got is an avalanche of money into politics this year as George Soros, Democratic big shots and, to a lesser extent, Republican moneymen (Republicans are slower on the uptake) get into the business of "independent" political expenditures.

All that McCain-Feingold did was make it impossible to make huge personal contributions to political parties. But if you have far more money than you can ever hope to spend, what to do? Buy another Gulfstream V? No. Play an even more important role in politics by bankrolling your very own "527," a tax-code loophole that enables the fat cats to fund their own political advertising so long as they do not "coordinate" with the candidate."