I think one of the more striking points made in the reading for this week was regarding putting spending in political campaigns in perspective - "Bradley Smith observes that Americans spend two times as much on potato chips every year as candidates spend on political campaigns" (p116) - because it can be easy to simply look at the amount money goes into campaigns and be offended or morally indignant at the situation, but really there's a lot of money being spent on much less important things. The money spent on politics may appear staggering, but compared to how much is spent advertising cars or Diet Coke, it becomes less so.
So to the extent that campaign finance reform levels the playing field for all candidates in competition for an office, certainly it can be a good thing. Does it actually work that way? Well...sometimes, I think so. Maybe "in theory" is a better way to put it. While both primaries and campaign money regulations are intended to diminish the influence of political organizations and give that influence back directly to the voters, and in some ways they do, it seems more likely that this has only changed the way in which political organizations (whether they be parties, interests groups, donor groups, etc.) exert their influence. Someone always has to define and drive political, policy, and electoral discussion, and regardless of the type of primary or regulations on money, people will always naturally organize themselves into like-minded groups and attempt to win elections. In the U.S. this takes place largely through the structure of the Democratic and Republican Parties, to whom any smaller groups (or factions) tend to acquiesce to in order to get action on a particular issue that is important to them. So long as the political sphere remains broad, the logic of Madison in Federalist #10 still holds in that it is remains unlikely for either party or smaller faction to unduly affect the operation of the government in a substantially negative way. Except for the 2000 Election I guess. Just kidding!
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Although campaign finance is implemented for positive reasons. And you are very accurate when you said, "In theory" campaign finance would work but other factors will always contribute to campaign influence through money. As long as there are business, organizations or special interest groups, there will political influence. The best case scenario would be campaigns running without any outside influences
I think your statement is very interesting about how when you look at it the amount of money that politicians use on campaigns pales in comparison to other insignificant things. The amount of money that they spend always seems like a huge amount, but, like you pointed out when automobile of soda companies use money to advertise it is a lot, a lot more.
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