If this is true, then good for him. If it wasn't clear that the system was dead before this election cycle, it certainly is now. Small donor democracy is the new reality, and our campaign finance system needs to be rewritten to take that fact into account.
UPDATE: Apparently he didn't actually opt out, but instead said that he is leaving his options open, and won't do or say anything formally until after the battle for the nomination is over.
And just to be perfectly clear about this, I'm already on the record saying that this "pledge" was a huge mistake for Obama. It was a silly unforced error on his part.
UPDATE II: Mark Schmitt has much more here, including this important clarification:
I described this a few weeks ago as a "pledge" to participate, but I should not have. Obama's precise statement was, and has always been, "If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." That's an artful statement, and it's not artful in a "meaning of 'is'" sense -- it's exactly the right answer. A commitment to "preserve a publicly financed election" would have to mean much more than whether both participate in the system. It would require some significant agreement about how to handle outside money, 527s, "Swift Boat"-type attack groups, party money, etc., and other factors that have undermined the last two publicly financed elections, from both sides. It is hardly an evasion to describe this as an agreement to be negotiated, rather than a simple pledge.
The side story here is why many of the the "traditional" campaign finance reform advocates and the Times and Post editorial boards still seem so hynotized by McCain-as-reformer, a pose he adopted for a period that ended years ago, that they cannot call him on his evasion of public funds in the primary, and are happy to be used to echo his first partisan attack in the general election, against someone who, unlike McCain, really has been a remarkably consistent and hard-working supporter of public financing, at both the state and national level.
For the record, it appears that Obama is still standing by this much more complex version of the "pledge." Here's what he had to say on Friday:
"If I am the nominee I will make sure our people talk to John McCain's people to find out if we are willing to abide by the same rules and regulations with respect to the general election going forward. It would be presumptuous of me to start saying now that I am locking in to something when I don't even know if the other side will agree to it. And I'm not the nominee yet. We're trying to get through this process. As soon as we do I assure you my folks and John McCain's folks will sit down and see if we can arrive at a common set of ground rules," Obama told reporters.
The key phrase is the last one: a common set of ground rules. This isn't just about an agreement on public financing, but something much broader. Both the clinton and McCain camps don't seem to understand this, a mistake that is at least partly Obama's fault. He needs to be much more explicit about this. Until he is, I'm going to try and stay away from this subject.
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