[AnthonyMouse]

> Is something like Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 a form of political advertising?

Not only that, is CNN or Fox News coverage of a sitting politician who is running for reelection a form of political advertising? How they choose to report stories -- and which stories they choose to report -- can certainly affect how the voters view the candidates.

Probably the best solution is to just have a signature requirement where if you get that many signatures, the government gives your campaign an amount of money equal to the average amount of private money raised by successful candidates running for the same level of office in the previous election.

Then the average privately-funded campaign will have twice that much (if they get the signatures too), but a factor of two isn't huge here. It's more of a threshold situation where once you reach a saturation point it's diminishing returns. Get the candidate to that point with public money and the value of trading legislation for private money would be much diminished.

Of course, you still have the problem that too many people vote for who cable news tells them to.