Britt Blaser has an excellent essay up echoing one of the themes I’ve been harping on so much here at AEV: how the logic of our current political system (small numbers of large contributors funding everything) could be completely up-ended if large numbers of small contributors got involved, and how it’s looking more and more like the day is nigh when that’s going to happen:

All the campaigns are talking about money, which is what politicians care about. We can put an end to that foolishness with a simple strategy: Buy a campaign by showering it with so many $50 contributions that they won’t have to worry about corporate contributions. Apparently the Republicans are raising $200 million from their closest friends based on a single cynical premise:

You can buy people’s votes

The back story on that cynical assumption is that they need to be bought because they never manifest themselves other than through big time TV marketing.

But someone said recently that, if a million people give $1,000, the Republican’s cynical assumptions go out the window…

A freely associating mob is forming around the Dean campaign. Its communication tools will soon transcend the Campaign comment archives, by organizing its own tools. The campaign can’t stop them nor should it want to, though there are surely consultants who would just as soon all this went away. Too late…

The smart mob is not limited by the campaign’s preconceptions. At a gut level, this mob seems to be saying, “We’ve got plenty of money for this little problem. Shit, we give $4 billion a year to Apple Computer. Apple”

Why not — if the problem is that our political system has been corrupted by money, maybe what we need is to drive out old money with new. Maybe, as sad of a thought as it is, the first step towards fixing things is for people to buy it back. [Seen on The Doc Searls Weblog]