The 2008 U.S. presidential race will be "the most expensive election in American history," according to a statement in January 2007 by Federal Election Commission Chairman Michael Toner.

Toner estimated that the 2008 race will be a "$1 billion election," and that to be "taken seriously," a candidate will need to raise at least $100 million by the end of 2007.

One journalist estimates costs have more than doubled in only eight years.

While the U.S. political marketing machine may resist campaign reform on the grounds that it limits to freedom of speech, is it in anyone's best interest to blow such obscene amounts of cash on an election?

There's a second problem: how can the average citizen ever feel adequately educated about the candidates in the age of social media, and the 24-hour news cycle?

Maybe there's a less is more solution.

What if each citizen knew that to do their duty by self-educating, they would need to do just, say, three to five things:

• Watch 2 to 3 nationally televised town hall meetings among all the candidates (available online following the live event)
• Read their local newspaper, say, every Wednesday when each candidate woul respond to a single issue facing the country (also archived and available online); and
• Tackle one key issue in-depth, one day each month via live broadcast (available online following)
• Visit the web sites or blogs of each candidate between traditional media events for interim updates and information to satiate the more is more crowd.

So as naive and hopeful as this may sound, here's our 6 Point U.S. Presidential Election Campaign Reform Plan, intended as a conversation starter, for whatever political party is gutsy enough to move in this direction:

1. Self-regulate campaigning across all your candidates. Announce this immediately.
2. Cut all planned paid political advertising for each candidate (which few citizens believe nor learn from anyway).
3. Commit to communicating less: let citizens know that they need only pay attention to, say just 3 to 5 media events (see below) to do their duty and be informed.
4. Enlist the help of journalists to reinforce who is running and which media events citizens should not miss.
5. Invite constituents to follow their candidates on the campaign trail as often as they like -- and interact with the candidates -- via each candidate's socially suped-up web site, as is being done supremely well now by Barack Obama.
6. Divert saved dollars to the winning candidate to address real problems, post-election.

So what's better? Reckless burn of $1 billion and overwhelming citizens with so much political rhetoric our heads spin, or a less is more approach in our noisy world?

What do you think?

Qumana