Introduction

[Margaret Holt <mholt@coe.uga.edu>]

Taylor, I think if you are a citizen in this country you are having a personal experience with this topic whether you recognize it up-close or not.  Saturday we held a forum on this topic at the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked the people who were deliberating in the group I attended how they ranked this issue in importance to other complex and difficult issues in our society - public schools, health care, the environment, and so forth.  The comments expressed were that this issue of Money and
Politics is central/core to addressing any of the other problems.
People felt that if we didn't introduce better democratic practices in campaign financing and lobbying, then we weren't going to successfully address any of the other issues.  I tend to agree.

On Sunday a headline story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution was about some possible illegal activities in the campaign funding of the '97 election of Atlanta's current mayor.  This was followed later in the paper by an aggressive editorial focused on encouraging voters to for people of high integrity who would be running next for this office. 

I held the Money and Politics forum with members of my family last weekend, and the cynicism and mistrust about government of the 30-somethings at the table was very troublesome.  If a majority of the people in the United States increasingly believe we really don't have a democracy operating then what is on the horizon for the future of our nation?  If people don't believe we have a democracy, should we expect an advancing deterioration of civil society?