Senator John McCain When we last wrote about John McCain, he had just lost the presidential election by a 365 to 173 Electoral College landslide after being massively outspent by the Obama campaign’s fundraising juggernaut. The Republican nominee’s financial disparity stemmed, in part, from his decision to accept $84.1 million in public funds, forgoing any campaign contributions for the general election campaign. Meanwhile, Obama raked in $150 million in private donations during September alone.

In an interview published yesterday, McCain told The Washington Times that the public finance system is now effectively dead: “No Republican in his or her right mind is going to agree to public financing. I mean, that’s dead. That is over. The last candidate for president of the United States from a major party that will take public financing was me.”

McCain might have come to this conclusion a lot sooner had he read some of the interviews done by the Center for its The Buying of the President 2008 project. Recorded during 2007-08, here are some of their highlights regarding public financing:

• 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry warned potential 2008 nominees against opting into the system: “If 527s are allowed to be out there blasting away at you, and you are limited in what you are able to control as your message, you are screwed. And so unless there is a comprehensive reform, I wouldn’t recommend to some candidate to go off and commit suicide.”

• 1996 Republican nominee Bob Dole said “Who is going to take the subsidy? … I think the system is broken.”

• 1984 Democratic nominee and former Vice President Walter Mondale suggested that having candidates opt out of public financing “shows the total collapse of the federal system.”

But this comment was the most amusing:

“I think as far as federal presidential funding for the purposes certainly of this election cycle, it’s dead. I mean, this will be the first presidential campaign that doesn’t take general-election federal contributions. And I cannot envision a scenario where the leading Democrat candidate won’t have more than what the government’s going to give them left in their primary account by the time of their convention. And that means the Republican candidate will be forced into the same kind of a routine.”

That was from Rick Davis, who served as chief executive officer of the 2008 presidential campaign of McCain himself.

The prospects for fixing the system seem bleak. The unsuccessful “Presidential Funding Act of 2007” proposal to increase the general election grant to $100 million (still below Obama’s one-month haul in September) never made it out of committee. But there is a glimmer of hope for public finance enthusiasts: among the seven co-sponsors of the bill were then-senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

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