Quote Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy View Post
He didn't say it doesn't much matter. He said that incumbency matters more, which I believe you acknowledged, and also asserted that money doesn't have any sort of directly progressive effect on the outcome, that it rather operates with fairly distinct plateaus or saturation levels. Which is hardly a controversial claim.
Yes, I'd never argue that the effects of money were strictly linear. But I'll stand by the "all other things being equal" argument. Since most of the other things are beyond one's control, money becomes one of the few factors a politician DOES have control over. I think it follows that if you want to win in politics, you sell your soul for money, because a lot of the rest is random noise of the universe that you can't alter.

Certainly Obama did this. Good political call, bad soul call.