Mike Thompson: “Yes, yes, that is absolutely true. That, therein, lies the problem. We had a system for about two decades whereby people…”

“Yes, yes, that is absolutely true. That, therein, lies the problem. We had a system for about two decades whereby people made a deal with the Government to run for President, and that is we will take millions of dollars in public money and we don't raise any private money. The Supreme Court held that up, it worked fine, no scandal, no constitutional problem, until we decided that there was not enough money in the system and that there were ways that we could get more money for our Presidential campaigns. We have just seen the results of that. The soft money situation started. We figured out a way that money could be given to the parties for the benefit of the Presidential candidates, and you could just add that, to the public financing that we already had. And so in this last campaign we had about $262 million in soft money, in addition, which was about 10 times what it had been a decade before. And that is the situation that we have now.”