Who could have guessed that Sen. Barack Obama — of all people — would convince us that public funding of politics is a flop?

You may have already known that — surely so, if you have been paying attention to the history of the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. Since it was created in 1976, that fund has created a litany of political hypocrisy — a succession of candidates who say they don't believe in public funding of political campaigns, but then line up at the trough to get their share of public funds.

One inevitable result of that duplicity is more cynicism from average Americans about politicians, and now Obama has added a new wrinkle: He's refusing to accept $85 million in public funds because of the voluntary limit on spending that's attached.

This makes him the first major party candidate for the presidency in 30 years to turn down public funding, and it also makes it harder for him to be seen as a nonpolitician who puts ideals above expedience.

Here's Obama's explanation: "The public financing of presidential elections as its exists today is broken, and we face opponents who've become masters at gaming the broken system."

Presumably, he was referring to the campaign of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — whose name, whether justly or not, has become a synonym for campaign smears. The Swift Boaters' prime objective was to refute Sen. John Kerry's combat record in the Vietnam War during the 2004 election.

In a recent column in The Star, Jay Ambrose, asserted that if any injustice was done, it was not to Kerry, but to the Swift Boaters, who were merely telling the truth, so don't deserve to have their name associated with political smears. (Ambrose was formerly director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, with which The Star is associated.)

Meanwhile, Newsweek reports that millionaire T. Boone Pickens has "reneged" on his pledge to pay $1 million to anyone who could prove the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were wrong about Kerry. Clearly, Pickens doesn't accept Ambrose's allegations as "proof." In politics, it seems that truth — like beauty — is in the eye of the beholder.

Whether the Swift Boat campaign was truth or smear, its mere existence was enough to make anyone give up on the whole idea of the Presidential Election Campaign Fund.

President Bush accepted the limitations that go with public funding, but those limitations didn't apply to the Swift Boaters — since that was a separate, off-the-books campaign. Worse yet, that allowed Bush to disavow any responsibility for the smear campaign — even though its goal was to get him re-elected. Now Obama is foregoing $84 million in public funding because he plans to spend a lot more than that — perhaps as much as $300 million — to counter John McCain's official campaign, plus whatever unofficial campaigns — like the Swift Boat Veterans — are waged on McCain's behalf.

We must hope that Obama isn't preserving his ability to finance Swift Boat-type campaigns of his own, but his flip-flop in public funding doesn't inspire much confidence that he'll resist any such urge.

Since one of the primary goals of the Presidential Election Campaign Fund is to limit the overall spending on campaigns, the system, in Obama's words, is obviously broken. But even before he came along, that was obvious to anyone who was really paying attention.

One huge proof of that: The decline in the percentage of taxpayers checking off contributions to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund on their Form 1040 income tax returns. Even though that $3 doesn't come out of the taxpayer's pocket, millions of taxpayers are deciding not to contribute. Why?

Let's take a not-so-wild guess: Perhaps they see that the system just isn't limiting overall spending on campaigns. The limits only apply to the official campaign, and there's no limit on the off-the-books campaigns waged on a candidate's behalf.

Nor can there be any effective limit on those campaigns, not as long as the U.S. Supreme Court equates political contributions with freedom of speech — and the high court just reaffirmed that equation.

In a case from New York, the court held that the "millionaires' amendment" is unconstitutional. That state provision allowed candidates to exceed voluntary campaign spending limits — if their opponents were financing their campaigns from personal fortunes.

In the court's view, millionaires seem entitled to buy — in the form of cash contributions to their own campaigns — whatever level of "freedom of speech" they can afford, and voluntary limits accepted by their opponents would continue to apply.

Keeping in mind how the Presidential Election Campaign Fund has been such a flop in terms of achieving its goal, we must wonder why some folks still propose some form of public funding for political campaigns in California.

If the system doesn't work at the federal level, why would it work at the state level? The Supreme Court's equation of free speech and campaign funds would apply within California's state borders, just as it did in New York.

In the nature of overly zealous partisanship in American politics, we've now alienated Democrats by the comments about Obama's flip-flop, and alienated Republicans by the comments about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — so this is an equal-opportunity column, leaving just one question: In the immortal words of Don Rickles, is there anyone I haven't offended yet?

— Chuck Thomas is a Star columnist whose column appears on the Opinion pages each Saturday. His e-mail address is star4cthomas@earthlink.net.