Public financing of elections sounds good, but in practice it always turns into a scam, just like anything else involving “free” money.

The Left-wing Working Families Party (WFP) — that’s the party founded by ACORN and  New York public employee unions — is now calling for taxpayer-funded campaigns, using the arrest of  senior state legislators on corruption charges as the news hook.

It’s laughable considering that the WFP already uses taxpayer money to fund elections — the money unions legally snatch from the paychecks of their members, who are involuntarily “unionized” upon hiring.

The WFP sees an opportunity in taxpayer-funded campaigns to prohibit anything but public money in New York elections. Because Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2.5 million voters in the Empire State, that would pretty much kill off whatever is left of the GOP. Republicans, who generally want to spend less on government, virtually never get the support of unions and other government-funded organizations, which provide Democrats running for office tens of thousands of dollars in “in kind” contributions every election cycle — that is, boots on the ground, phone banks, mailings to their membership, email blasts, etc. Under public financing, Republicans would be prohibited from countering that with private donations.

New York City has a campaign finance system that is hailed as the best in the nation. But anyone who has studied it closely — or who has worked with it — knows it is nothing but a cash cow for incumbents.

The system matches every campaign dollar raised from a New York City resident 6-1, if candidates agree to limit their spending. So, for example, if a candidate raises $100 from a friend, it miraculously becomes $700 after some requisite bureaucratic thwaks to the head from the Soviet-like New York City Campaign Finance Board. A friend and former senior city election official burst into laughter when first hearing of that matching ratio. “Anyone guaranteeing a six-to-one match on your money is begging abuse,” he noted, shaking his head. In this case, it is the taxpayer getting screwed.

There are 51 City Council elections in New York City every four years: a mayoral race; five races for Borough President; one race for comptroller, and another for something counterintuitively called the “Public Advocate.” A handful of these races are competitive. The rest are won by margins like 93-7. Or 88-12. Or, when they are close, 75-25.

But that doesn’t stop incumbents from loading up on public cash. They use it to hire friends and consultants, to buy laptops, desktops, Blackberries, Flip cameras, camera cameras, and office supplies. And they keep it all after the election.

All that public money — city taxpayers spent $44 million on campaigns in 2009 — has done nothing to make democracy work better. In fact, in most cases one could argue, it has made campaigns less competitive. Incumbent have networks of small donors who allow them to “max out” (get the maximum amount of matching dollars available by law) within days or weeks, while challengers have to start from scratch.

It’s no wonder the WFP wants publicly-financed state elections. It will save them money they can transfer into federal races, finish off the GOP in New York, and re-elect the politicians who give them everything they want at the bargaining table. All in the name of “good government.”

Whether you supported President Obama or not in 2008, his clear lack of focus in recent weeks has to give one pause. Today, while the situations in Japan and Libya spin seemingly out of control, we learn that the President is filming his NCAA March Madness picks that will be made available tomorrow live on ESPN.  He played his 61st round of golf as President on Saturday.

Everyone understands that the President has to do silly things from time to time, and he has every right to relax on occasion, but filming NCAA tournament guesses today? Are there no grown-ups left in the White House to advise the President?

Or is the Obama White House abdicating America’s traditional leadership role in the international arena for ideological reasons?  Is it ducking decision-making and responsibility so that others like Britain’s David Cameron or France’s Nicolas Sarkozy step up to the plate? It’s the only thing that might make sense.

But if President Obama is looking to steer America into a back-seat role, shouldn’t he discuss that with the American people first?  Otherwise we, and others in the world, will have no choice but to think his presidency is adrift.

“Everyone here is puzzled as to how many casualties the international community judges to be enough for them to help. Maybe we should start committing suicide to reach the required number,” Libyan rebel spokesman, Essam Gheriani, as reported in The Telegraph.

Brave Companions by David McCullough (Simon and Schuster 1992) describes sacrifices Americans have made throughout history to advance the national cause. Most of these portraits involve well-know figures like John and Washington Roebling, Charles and Anne Lindbergh, Frederic Remington, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

But others describe the courage of veritable unknowns, those laboring on the Panama Canal under intolerable conditions or fighting gun-slinging strip miners in eastern Kentucky. One I’ll always remember is the Army Corp of Engineers officer who experiments on himself, and dies, to prove that the malaria killing his men  is caused by mosquitoes not swamp gases.

McCullough’s book comes to mind this morning while reading about the 50 remaining workers at the Fukishima nuclear plant in Japan. All other workers have been evacuated, but 50 remain behind to do whatever they can to forestall a nuclear meltdown. It’s as close to a suicide mission as one can imagine.

We aren’t taught enough about such heroes — the submariner who shuts the valve on himself to save his ship mates; the nurse who comforts the contagious in a pandemic. History textbooks record some; most go forever unknown.

But here in Japan, before our very eyes, are 50 profoundly brave players in a life and death scenario of extraordinary magnitude. They are risking everything for others.

We should know their names.

If you knew what you were going to look like in 20 or 30 years, would it make you save money?  Not for a plastic surgery procedure – or a plastic bag and a handful of tuenols – but for retirement?

That’s what a Northwestern University study found, according to Rupert Murdoch’s new online newspaper, The Daily. The study suggests that young people cannot conceive of becoming old, so showing them a likeness of themselves years hence helps them concentrate the mind.  In other words, one look at your Dorian Gray portrait and you think, “That poor bastard. I gotta do something.”

I wonder if those same researches could devise a picture of our national financial health in decades to come.  Might help our respective legislators come budget time.

Huge congratulations to friend and mentor Ed Rollins on his induction into the American Association of Political Consultants Hall of Fame.  Ed is as tough and as charming as they come, and there is no better story teller in America.  His stories are so good, in fact, that not a single one of them can be repeated.

The former boxer and Reagan campaign manager has had, and continues to have, quite a career.

Here is a Washington Post story on Rollins’s induction in the political Hall of Fame.

It’s hard not to like someone who pokes fun at himself, even when it’s the normally-strident James Carville.

Carville deserves credit for this self-deprecatory Newsweek interview about his 2009 bomb, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.

“I’m not one to hide my bad calls,” Carville explains. “When I was wrong about the 2002 elections, I dumped a garbage can on my head. When my John Kerry prediction didn’t pan out in 2004, I smashed an egg on my face. So when my old colleague George Stephanopoulos asked me on ABC what I’d do if the Republicans won Congress, I quickly changed the subject to my New Orleans Saints.”

We could use more of this spirit in politics today. Especially among those of us who are wrong at least half the time.

CNN is getting its mojo back.  At least I think so.

A network I once loved – and then couldn’t stand to watch – has again become the default station on my television screen at night.

It’s all the international news of course. The revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East and the tsunami coverage in Japan once again show that no one can touch CNN for ‘round-the-world news coverage.

CNN seemed to have forgotten what it was in the past several years.  Maybe the 24-hour news network panicked at the rapid ascent of strongly-opinioned Fox News and gambled on being a counter-balance.  Or maybe it tried to cut costs by switching from expensive news gathering to an in-studio talking-head format.  Whatever the reason, the format and attitude change failed utterly to this viewer, and apparently hundreds of thousands of others based on CNN’s loss of market share to FOX and MSNBC in the first decade of this century.

CNN was like a miracle to news junkies like me when it first appeared in 1980.  It followed on the heels of another minor miracle, ABC News Nightline, – called “The Iran Crisis—America Held Hostage: Day [fill in the blank] when it launched in 1979” – the compelling four-hour nightly news program anchored by Ted Koppel.

The thing about CNN was that you could turn it on anytime – day or night – and see or hear the word’s news – with minimal editorial slant – unfolding before your eyes.  (I even forced myself to watch Larry King in the early years.) It was crack for news addicts.

Fox News and MSNBC are different and worthy animals.  If I want to nod-in-agreement-myself to sleep I’ll put on Fox.  My beloved sister, Ann, a loyal reader of this page, might choose MSNBC to do the same.

But if you want to watch news – news news – you’re supposed to go to CNN. I am so glad CNN is beginning to see things that way again.

If they would just shake that British guy at 9 pm…

Looks like the country is about to have a big conversation again about energy; this time not just about our dependence on foreign oil, but on the vulnerabilities of nuclear power plants as well.

Nuclear power had been making a major comeback in public opinion in the U.S.  The situation in Japan will halt that in its tracks.

Here in New York, we can expect the debate to focus on the Indian Point nuclear plant in Buchanan, NY – 25 miles northwest of New York City – which provides Westchester County (almost one million residents) and New York City (8 million) with a full 30% of their energy.  The plant is up for federal recertification in 2013 and Governor Cuomo already has said he opposes it.

But where will the energy come from to replace it?

New York doesn’t even have a site selection law on the books to locate new power plants, several of which would be needed to replace Indian Point.  Its so-called Article X siting law expired years ago over arguments that energy-generating plants have been disproportionately placed in low-income areas.  Proposals for new oil and gas pipelines and natural gas drilling are routinely blocked in court by Not-in-My-Back-Yard opponents or concerned environmentalists. Fantastical technologies have fizzled.

There are no easy answers here.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if nuclear power prevails in the end, despite how we feel about it on this day in history.

The union-controlled Democratic Party is trying to turn lemons into lemonade in the wake of their Wisconsin Waterloo.

The New York Times today reports that the Democrats plan to use the Wisconsin fight as a rallying cry for fundraising and Party organizing in 2012.  They especially hope to lure away from Republicans unaffiliated  voters who handed the House of Representatives back to the GOP in 2010.

It’s a smart play in the short term, but I think it will backfire in the long run.  Here’s why:

Polling has been mixed on how the American public views public sector unions and their collective bargaining privileges (has anyone really thought about them before now?) But even if a majority of Americans today agree that public employees deserve to bargain collectively for pension and work benefits   — and I’m not convinced they do – the ongoing debate will only highlight the extent to which state pension funds are underfunded.  That underfunding is a relatively unknown problem that arguably threatens the country’s future more than the federal deficit (states can’t print money.)

It is estimated that state pension funds are now owed a collective $3 trillion.  That money is constitutionally guaranteed to state workers who have far more lucrative retirement plans than the average private sector American who has to pay for them. Paying it will soon begin crowding out popular discretionary spending programs like school funding, senior services, parks, healthcare benefits, etc.

Last week, as a local board member the American Association of Political Consultants,  I helped host nationally-noted pollster John McLaughlin at a small gathering at my office in New York.  In the course of the evening, John walked through political trends occurring throughout the nation, followed by a question-and-answer session.

I asked him a question I’ve been wrestling with professionally:  “How to do you engage  voters who, virtually in the same breath, says they want government spending reduced, but oppose almost every budget cut?”

The pollster’s answer: “Educate them about the extent of the problem.”

That’s exactly what a Democratic-Party-led campaign over public employee union “rights” will do.  It will educate Americans about the extent of state debt – and the  disparity between their own retirement plans and those they are shouldering for public employees.

There is a cardinal rule in law: Never raise a question to which you aren’t sure of the  answer.  There is a cardinal rule in public relations: Never repeat a negative.

The Democratic Party is about to violate both.