(President Barack Obama delivering his electoral victory speech on Election Night ´08, in Grant Park, Chicago. Gabbec, Creative Commons)

Despite the fact that he said this in the year 2000, nothing much has changed. The preoccupation with fundraising is more evident than ever before. As the race to the White House gets more and more expensive, prospective candidates are spending unprecedented amount of time focusing on raising support. One has to wonder if talking about money has replaced talking about the issues.

This upcoming election is gearing up to be the priciest election in history. President Obama has already spent over $80 million on election-related events and items for this campaign season.

To put that amount of money into perspective: the lavish and widely broadcasted royal wedding between Kate Middleton and Prince William cost $10 million less than what Obama has spent in the election so far.

According to statistics, almost 75 percent of the spending goes toward media related elements. That’s an incredibly high amount of money going toward advertisements and television appearances. Since when did running for office become this similar to promoting a major film or television show? It all comes down to who spends the most money marketing.

The following excerpt by Marty Kaplan from the Huffington Post sums it up nicely:

“The $6 billion it will take to run for office in 2012 has to come from someone, mainly in big bundles, and that someone isn't you or me. Those contributions come with strings attached. It's illegal to trade money for votes, but few politicians are stupid enough to get caught doing that. There's nothing illegal about privileging your big donors and their lobbyists with access to you and your staff. It's perfectly understandable that you say, and even believe, that you make decisions by weighing the merits, not the wallets.

I don’t know if I would call this campaign system corrupted because corruption is not brought on by the system but the people involved with the system. But it almost seems like the system was made to fail. It was made to be very susceptible to corruption and bribery.

So before we can reform health care, social security, or the economy, we need to think about reforming campaign finance. People who are being elected into office are indebted to the people who financially helped them get there. We need to get rid of many of the strings that are tying politicians down before we can expect them to help the common man.

Contact staff writer Sammi Wong here.