Recent articles on Obama’s rejection of public funding elicits the old axiom “Be careful what you wish for”. In the early days of his campaign, when the presumptive Democratic nominee was Hillary Clinton, Obama could speak his heart. He spoke with reckless abandon on the virtues of a level playing field and the need for ideology and purpose being more important than money and political pedigree.

Those days are gone. Obama is entering that phase of his political career in which mistakes are no longer measured in slips of the tongue, but in slips of strategic judgment.

Rest assured that if roles were reversed, McCain’s campaign would have made the same difficult decision. Americans can overlook a lot in a presidential candidate, but what they cannot stomach is poor financial judgment. Money is king in the U.S.. In these times of a struggling economy, no amount of reason and no ideological stance could justify depriving hundreds of millions of dollars from the most popular candidacy since JFK. Now THAT would be political suicide. He really had no choice.

The RNC has outpaced the DNC by a 2 to 1 margin in fund raising. But at the candidate level, Obama and Clinton outpaced McCain by 3 to 1 rising nearly $400 million. Obama’s campaign raised over $250 million of that.

At the time Obama announced his decision to forego public funding, he had over $45million in cash on hand. McCain had a little over $21million. The spending cap of $80 million that the public funding option represents is probably less than half of what the Obama campaign machine can raise between now and November. McCain will probably also pass the $80million mark, but not by much.

To date, the Obama campaign has spent more on advertising than Clinton and McCain combined. The latest polls show, that if the national election were held today, Obama would win with 46% of the vote to McCain’s 41%. The margin has favored Obama since Clinton’s concession. His polling margin continues to increase by about one percentage point each week to 10 days.

Put in perspective, the $80million per candidate is not a huge stipend given that the total spending for all candidates is well over $780million. The 2008 election will most likely be the first election in US History in which candidates raised and spent over $1Billion.

With the White House in reach the private funding decision was necessary. Many more “necessary” decisions will come Obama’s way in the next five years. His purported ideological naïveté and inexperience wanes as he gets closer to the most critical position of power in the world.

Sorry to see the old Obama go. The King is Dead. Long live the King.

JB