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History offers rich examples and stern warnings.
Yet when we look to history for lessons on campaign finance reform in the United States, it teaches more by absence than by example. From our late twentieth century vantage point, it is clear that reform is not a matter of returning to a golden age of democratic bliss when elections were fair and government served everyone's interests equally. Such a period never existed. This means that all those dedicated to overhauling the current election finance system must first imagine, and then bring about, an entirely new way of paying for campaigns - that is, a new relationship between private money and public politics. Unfortunately, history yields no good models.