It's time to ditch the stupid, self-destructive cynicism that assumes that since money in involved in campaigning, the candidate is in the pocket of big money. Money is involved in campaigning--there's a rumor that it's been so for centuries, even including such people as St. John Kennedy and St. Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Get over it.

Each candidate is different.

The sour cynics should start listening to what a candidate says and what he does, rather than recoiling in pious horror from filthy lucre.

If you do believe that money is the only factor that determines everything in politics, you do in fact, as I said, subscribe to the conspiracy theory that money pulls the strings in all cases in all candidates---a singularly embittering and self-defeating attitude.

And one pretty clearly held dearly by a few rather masochistic Mudcatters, who are totally incapable of understanding the difference between realism and cynicism.