In May the General Accounting Office looked at the public funding of election campaigns in two states, Maine and Arizona, and said that it was too soon to tell whether the programs were working.

“Too early to draw causal linkages to changes, if any, that resulted from the public funding programs,” said the unofficial U.S. bureau for accountability.

But not too early to get our hopes up.

Mainers can let their hopes rise a little higher based on the further analysis by Public Campaign, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that promotes public funding of campaigns.

Using the GAO’s own data and other data, Public Campaign finds that, yes, it is too early, but yes, the early returns are rosy indeed.

They found:

• A greater diversity of candidates. In Maine, the number of women candidates was up 12 percent between 1998 and 2002.

• An increase in contested primaries. They rose from 6 percent to 8 percent in Maine.

• An increase in the number of races won by a margin of 15 percent or less. In Maine, 22 percent of state Senate races were decided by that margin in 1998; in 2002, 50 percent of state Senate races were that close.

• A decline in average spending in legislative House races. The costs dropped 10 to 20 percent in Maine between the two publicly funded cycles and the previous two cycles.

• An increase in voter turnout, up 5 percent in Maine between 1998 and 2002.

Arizona often showed similar or more dramatic shifts.

While it may be too soon to celebrate, the signs are positive that public funding of candidates does exactly what it’s supposed to do.


Lasting impression


We all know about Custer’s last stand, but what about his penultimate stand?

The last shall be first, but what about the penultimate? Where shall it lurk in line, eventually?

It is easy enough to savor the penultimate piece of candy in a roll of Lifesavers or to recall the penultimate mile of a long journey.

But for the truly finite things in life – the last breath, the last kiss, the last tango in Paris – the penultimate event doesn’t stand a chance. No one sees it coming. It is history before someone notices it was next to the last. By then, we’re too fixated on the last dance, the last one in, the last word.

In “Citizen Kane,” what did Kane say just before “Rosebud”? The cinematic world will never know.

Ironically, if we live each day as if it were the last, we’ll end up appreciating the penultimate day a lot more. We’ll be wrong about it, but on the last day we probably won’t care.
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