James: Our campaign finance system makes almost no sense at all. By limiting contributions, it maximizes the power of lobbyists with large rolodexes, making them far more powerful today than they once were.
The ability to loan to one’s own campaign is a personal and political freedom that makes sense to me — one of the few things that does.
But it also requires judgement on the part of the donor. At the end of any losing campaign, when a candidate realizes he is going to lose ahead of everyone else, he may begin raising money to cover at least part of the loan. Caveat donor.