MICKEY KAUS WRITES:

As Jeanne Cummings’ outstanding, worth-digging-up 12/2 Wall Street Journal piece makes clear, the new Democratic Party, for presidential purposes, isn’t the Democratic Party. It’s a just-formed group called America Votes, which plans to coordinate the various “independent” committees (many of the so-called “527” non-profits) that can still, after McCain-Feingold, gather unlimited “soft” donations and spend them on campaign ads and voter mobilization. … If the old Democratic Party version of the Democratic Party was too beholden to liberal interest groups, the new America Votes version of the Democratic Party is liberal interest groups.

There’s a larger lesson here. The one pretty clear effect of campaign finance “reform” has been to weaken traditional party structures to the benefit of discrete special interests. It’s not clear that this development has been good for politics, or even for honesty in politics. At best it produces only the appearance of honesty — and I’d say it’s failing even at that nowadays. (Hey, somebody should write a book on that!) But perhaps, as Kaus suggests (you should read his whole post), Internet fundraising will save us.