DAVID FRENCH (SENIOR FELLOW, NATIONAL REVIEW): This is going to be an -- there will be an extraordinary amount of money spent in this election. Any Democrat who emerges from the primary is going to have an avalanche of small-dollar donors. These are the kinds of things that are not real sacrifices in large part because there's so many other people and outside groups using their freedom of speech to argue issues, in some circumstances to argue for candidates. So this is one of those sacrifices that is not going to mean much in the real world. It's something that plays well for the very small slice of voters who really rank high on their list of concerns the amount of money in politics. But let's keep all this in perspective. The amount of money in politics is still far, far less than the amount of money we spend on lots of different kinds of random consumer goods and yet politics help shape the direction of the world's only superpower. So I'm not entirely convinced that there is too much money in politics.
STEPHANIE RUHLE (HOST): Really?
FRENCH: Really. When you consider that Americans will spend probably more money on their pets, for example, than they'll spend on trying to work through and wrestle through some of the most important ideas shaping the destiny of our nation in an atmosphere of unbelievable civic ignorance in this country. How do you get a message out to people --
RUHLE: And you think campaign -- hold on a second. Do you think campaign dollars actually make us smarter on the civics front? If that kind of money was actually going to, I don't know, civics education in public schools, I might buy that argument.
FRENCH: Well one of these things that dollars do is they allow people to have access to voters. They allow people to have access to voters to share a message. You know, we -- those of us who pay close attention to politics get sick of the avalanche of ads. We are completely over-burdened with information. The average voter is not.
