Big Money in politics

McCain-Feingold was passed in 2002, or thereabouts, as a way to limit the so-called unlimited "soft" money contributions of the super wealthy to the political system and thereby limit the influence of these particular players.  The net result of this legislation was to create the 527s and a parallel funding mechanism for politics to the now highly regulated party system.  Thus there is now more money in the political system than ever before, its simply harder to track and account for.  People like George Soros are now kingmakers behind the scenes, largely hidden from accountability, pulling their strings throught the 527 organizations like Move on.org, etc.  This 2005  article in the Boston Globe tells the story in some detail and if it is in the interest of the democracy to limit the influence of a few super wealthy types, and it probably is, then it is worth trying to understand how all this works.  This article helps. According to the Powerline blog this book available at Amazon also is helpful to understand the strategy of Soros & co as it relates to their successful campaigns in Colorado, taking a republican leaning state and moving it into the democrat column.  A later example of this strategy working was the successful campaign of Al Franken in Minnesota,