The nail on the head
Robert Samuelson hits it:

[T]he United States' political tradition is that voters judge the truthfulness and relevance of campaign arguments. We haven't wanted our political speech filtered.

Now there's another possibility. The government may screen what voters see and hear. The Kerry campaign has asked the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to ban the Swift Boat ads; the Bush campaign similarly wants the FEC to suppress the pro-Democrat 527 groups. We've arrived at this juncture because it's logically impossible both to honor the First Amendment and to regulate campaign finance effectively. We can do one or the other -- but not both. Unfortunately, Congress and the Supreme Court won't admit the choice. The result is the worst of both worlds. We gut the First Amendment and don't effectively regulate campaign finance.

Both Bush and Kerry ... think curbing free speech is good and citizens banding together to influence elections is bad.

“I don’t think we ought to have 527s,” Bush said on Monday. “. . . I think they’re bad for the system. That’s why I signed the bill, McCain-Feingold.”

Bush misunderstands McCain-Feingold, which did not regulate 527s. But his sentiments are unconfused. He does not want citizens to be able to join together and freely spend their money to voice their opinions on national politics.

Kerry shares Bush’s disdain for the people’s freedom to speak their minds. He voted for McCain-Feingold’s strict limits on free speech rights, and he has tried to pressure media organizations to not run ads critical of him. ...

Bush and Kerry envision an America in which only the politicians have the right to make unrestricted political speech.

Republicans and Democrats are both big-government activists, they have a foundational philosophy that is the same:

America is a problem to be fixed, and Americans are a people to be managed. ...

I do not believe Bush’s domestic policies are in the best interests of our long-term freedom. I do not think that Bush’s domestic legacy will, in the long run, be good for the country.

Hence I cannot urge anyone to vote for Bush in 2004.

Which is not to say that I endorse any of the Democrats running for president; they are more strident big-government activists than Bush, and won’t protect us from terrorism to boot. So I feel caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.