This discussion of Dean's decision/vote on federal matching funds points out, once again, the real elephant in the room when it comes to the money flows in our campaign finance system. Our entire system of treating information and speech as a profit making commodity makes it impossible to have a democracy free of the corrosive effects of big, big money.
I'll start by stating a fairly unpopular position: the Supreme Court did not issue a fatally flawed decision in Buckley v. Valeo when they equated spending on media with free speech. The reason that decision seems so wrong on a visceral level is because our information delivery system in this country is fatally flawed. The decision is right considering our media landscape; it's the media landscape that is to blame.
Today, especially in the area of television, information is considered a commodity to be exploited and leveraged as part of a capitalist model; news as a profit center. It is not a resource to be shared but something to be mined. The high costs of entry into the television industry creates a situation where the capitalist controls the means of distribution of information. Money, therefore, is needed to access this means of distribution; without money, there really isn't free speech. That is, when you get right down to it, profoundly damaging to democracy. But, without a robust publicly financed system of television information delivery like those of most other Western nations (sorry PBS, I said "robust"), the money aspect of political speech is truly important.
You can see this as soon as you look at the possibilities when you start restricting what outside groups can do vis a vis buying political ads, etc. Should the Bush Administration/Delay Congress be able to pass laws defining what is permissable to be aired by outside groups (no anti-war ads in "wartime", maybe)? That's an extreme example in one way, but it points out the real 2nd Amendment problems of a governmental restriction on political ads by outside groups. So, should you be able to ban all outside ads? Then, what constitutes a "political party" able to run ads? The problems are myriad to this scheme. And without some restrictions on what outside groups spend, you can't really restrict what a candidate spends (how would a populist candidate be able to respond to a barrage of attacks by, say, PHARMA?).
This is also the main contributor to the generally degraded aspect of our news. Pure capitalism does not reward quality; it rewards efficiency. The goal in a profitable media venture is to reach the most eyeballs with the least production cost. Sometimes that's spending a bunch of money on Seinfeld, sometimes that's spending next to nothing getting a few people together on a set to scream at each other. It's almost never spending a bunch of money investigating how the No Child Left Behind Act is affecting schools around the country.
Before the Reagan Administration, FCC regulations had some role in alleviating the worst of the excesses of news. But, the advent of cable news combined with the gutting of the Fairness Doctrine and other regulatory rules served to fundamentally change the nature of television news. But, that is really a separate (although related) issue.
Dean's model of citizen involvement does hold promise of countering at least some of the more corrosive aspects of the money chase. And lowering the contribution limits might do even more. But, we can never have an election system even reasonably free from the problems of big money without a major change in our media landscape.