Getting 1,000 to give you a $5 donation so you can qualify for $145,000 in pubic financing for the May primary election? Yes, it's as difficult as it sounds.

Multiply the difficulty of getting 1,000 donations by the 7 candidates seeking to reach that 1,000-donor plateau, and the difficulty becomes alarming from the point-of-view of those who favor this system. Many of us donate to multiple candidates, favoring not the individual but the process (I've given to Cornett, Renaud and Volm; Cornett is my preferred candidate and I'll be glad to see either of the other two join him in the general election). Now the race is on to get to 1,000 by January 29th.

The trouble, of course, is that we have a special election (Measures 66 & 67; you may have heard about them) that is soaking up everyone's time and energy and a lot of their political money. By "everyone", of course, I mean the relative few people who give a damn about this stuff. Most Oregonians are happy to pretend that apart from the regularly scheduled May and November, even-year elections, nothing is going on with which they should concern themselves. Just because that kind of willful ignorance leads to the kinds of policies that makes them decide to be willfully ignorant makes no impression on these pseudo-citizens, which makes the those who care enough to be involved even greater.

That would include you, someone who is paying enough attention to even read this blog (tell your friends, family, the twitterverse!!!). You probably donate to campaigns, volunteer to phone bank or canvass, and do the other things that make both elections and democracy work. Like stay informed. And while it's not fair that the majority of your fellow citizens dump the load on a few of us, it is what it is. And if you want "it" to be at least a little better, keep doing what you can.

Contact any or all of the City Council candidates. They're all google-able; most have Facebook pages. Donate $5, not because you plan to vote for that specific person but because our democracy needs the proof that we can do this without the big donors. Oregon's campaign finance laws are among the most lax in the nation; Portland's publicly financed election system can help overturn this problem. Let's make it work in 2010 for these candidates and then we can work on spreading the system further. As Jason Renaud told me in our interview, this is a way to get rid of the lobbyists who carry much of the power in shaping state legislation.