Giving candidates public funds to help run their campaigns beats the alternative as a boost for clean government

It’s not a step to bring North Carolina into the land of political milk and honey, where campaign contributions by special interests fade from significance. But it might be possible to get a glimpse of that promised land from here.

A bill narrowly approved by the state House on Saturday would expand North Carolina’s program of public campaign financing for the first time into the state’s executive branch. Candidates for three elective offices — state auditor, superintendent of public instruction and insurance commissioner — would be eligible to have a goodly chunk of campaign expenses defrayed by the taxpayers.

While the privilege of subsidizing political campaigns may strike some of those taxpayers as a dubious one, the alternative is even less inviting when it means that officeholders have mainly special interests to thank for footing their campaign expenses. And nobody in their right mind thinks such generosity comes without expectations that the beneficiary, once he or she gains the keys to that nice office in Raleigh, won’t remember who "brung ‘em" to the dance.

The posts to be decoupled from the traditional fund-raising circus are among eight atop executive agencies that now are filled by election. Along with the governor and lieutenant governor, they constitute the Council of State. North Carolina is at the far end of the spectrum in having a large number of independently elected statewide officeholders. (more…)