This past Friday, former Senator and current presidential candidate John Edwards called for public financing of all elections during an interview on Real Time With Bill Maher. You can watch a clip of the interview after the jump.

The Washington Post is calling it an "invisible primary" - the lead-up to the 2008 presidential race in which the competitive candidates will be chosen on the basis of how much early money they can bring in from a small, elite circle of wealthy power players. You can't write a check for $2,000 and promise 100 friends who can do the same? Then your opinion means nothing.

Tomorrow, the third quarter of 2003 fundraising for presidential candidates will come to an end. Campaign finance reports from the candidates will be due two weeks later, but the campaigns with a story to tell will release their total “take” before then. The nation’s leading reporters predictably will concentrate on the dollar signs (did Dean raise more than $15 million? did Bush cross the $80 million threshold? what about Clark?), and will pronounce Democratic candidates winners or losers because of how much (or little) they collected. This will all feed into an analysis about how well that sets candidate X up to defy President Bush’s special interest fundraising juggernaut.