I was particularly struck by Warren Buffett's comments as recorded in
this diary. Naturally, I immediately went searching for a reason why this would be so. My conclusion is that the problem is systemic. It is literally a result of putting more people into the system than it was designed to handle. The ultimate solution is, naturally, to tweak the system so that it can handle more people. In order to achieve that we need a short term solution to gain the political power necessary to do so.
A full explanation follows.
Why is it that politicians need so much many? Many, I'm sure, are outright crooked. That is not the primary driver of money in to politics, though. The main reason politicians need money is because campaigns are expensive. Thus the undue influence that those who have a lot of money have on politics is just a symptom, and a bugger of a symptom it is. Any real and lasting solution to the problem must address campaign costs or it will eventually be undermined.
The next natural question is, then, why are campaigns so expensive? In a word: advertising. It takes a lot of money to reach constituents and convince them to vote for you. Television, radio, newspapers, mail, canvassing, etc all cost money. The obvious solution to this problem would be to try legislating the costs down with things like mandatory air time, etc. Another obvious solution is publicly financed campaigns. Both of these solutions share the same shortfalls: they are specific solutions that would require an administrative bureaucracy, lawsuits, etc. Some believe that the internet is the ultimate solution. Perhaps it could alleviate the problem, but as a technological solution there's no guarantee that it would not change or otherwise become obsolete. A far more elegant solution is to hit the problem at it's very source: reduce the number of constituents the politician has to reach.
Reducing the number of constituents per politician seems very straightforward at first - reduce the size of congressional districts. There is a balancing concern that limits the effectiveness of this tactic, though: the larger the legislative body the less deliberative and the more sluggish it will be. Finding the best balance is a difficult trick that is not guaranteed to succeed in the objective of cutting money out of politics. More change would be needed to achieve the objective. To that end, I borrow an idea from this diary of mine that is supposed to help democracy by proxy work: the concept of elected officials assigning their vote to others in order to accumulate enough votes to participate in the legislative body.
The basic idea is this: make congressional districts a size that would now be considered obscenely small. It may be possible to go as small as 500 to 10,000 to a district. The ideal being that the districts are so small that the candidates would have to campaign personally and the need to fundraise would be minimal. The winners of each district would then attend one or possibly a series of state conventions where politicians would try to sell themselves to each other. The goal is for a politician to gain enough votes to participate in the legislature - where he or she will cast all votes earned on all matters. Ideally, the districts would be kept so small that parties wouldn't even enter in to the equation until this step. The people assigning their district's vote are not to be simple electors, though. By making their assigned vote a matter of public record it opens the door to a very interesting way of increasing accountability in the system: they have the right to revoke their vote and assign it to someone else. That way, the district winners are not just one time functionaries, but watch dogs whose job it is to keep the people who they've assigned their vote to in line. As a practical matter, the times at which votes can be revoked and reassigned should be limited. Permitting it at any time is problematic for starters because it reduces stability. How often it should be done is something that can be tuned to improve the system. I would say not more often that monthly and not less often than every six months or so. How often to vote in the districts is another open question. Certainly not more often than yearly and not less often than every 4 years.
I still prefer the idea of Democracy by Proxy, though I would have to modify my previous comments to take in to consideration the conclusions reached here. The system outlined above would definitely be an improvement over the present one, though. I'm sure that there are still more potential solutions, and that mine have flaws in them somewhere, but taking care of those sorts of things is what the deliberative process is all about. I never addressed the President, Judicial branch, or the Senate, for instance. Certainly those need something, too, but in the interests of "brevity" I'll stop here.