This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 20, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

U.S. Senator Barack Obama has discovered a certain fundraising prowess and has

foregone public financing of his presidential campaign.

John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government comments.

Obama sort of represents two sides of the campaign finance coin, that is he has lots of very small donors but he also has lots of the big donors who have maxed themselves out so

He sort of he sort of represents both what opponents of a sort of free and open system of campaign

finance they he represents the good and the bad that's right I mean I think he's probably he's got a lot of donors out there that

that are new donors that are small donors. He's bought several hundred thousand

new donors into the system.

I think he's probably just fairly stunned and surprised by how successful he's been as everyone else is. This was not totally unexpected but the

size of the achievement I think is and the role of small donors in it the emergence of the internet.

This is an election like 1960 where television came of age.

It's the new technology having big effects.

And yeah, he represents both of them.

Now whether both sides of this debate,

but whether what has happened here

will genuinely change his outlook about campaign finance remains an open question I think.

And that speaks to your point that he may have been stunned by his ability to raise all this money by virtue of the fact that he

checked yes on the box to begin with to say yes in there is a set of circumstances

under which I will accept public financing well I think he actually believes in a lot of the fairly typical, as does John

McCain, a lot of fairly typical campaign finance agenda, including the virtues of

public financing and so on.

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