CU in hell case

I'm a little confused by the punditocracy's reaction to the Supreme Court decision last week, for a couple strange reasons.
1) Republican types are WAYYYY too happy about this decision.
2) Democrat types are apparently unaware that the majority, a clear majority, of registered Democrats liked this decision too.
3) Independents are pissed, or at best lukewarm.

I submit that all three groups are mostly wrong, though Democratic voters are probably in the best scenario of being slightly right.

Republicans seem to be happy because, other than McCain, none of them were all that happy about campaign finance laws in the first place. This leads to an assumption among liberal pundits that such laws are helpful for them (as to defeat Republicans in elections). Which they are, in fact, not, because it assumes that "corporations" are a monolithic political interest in the same way that say, unions tend to be. Corporations however include a vast underbelly of liberal or strict Constitutional views about things like free speech, in addition to the juggernauts who seem to run everything who, we are told, care only about profit reporting for their shareholders (without apparently bothering to investigate who those shareholders are, nor to determine whether this is, taken by itself, somehow a horrible perspective for a company to base its decision making). But the point is that "being seen as on the side of corporations" is not exactly "big business" politically. Winning elections and setting policies once in office is. So when Republicans nominate people that seem likely to win corporations jump on the bandwagon like anybody else does. They do not actually receive, for the most part, some sort of special GOP bonus handouts from corporations. The reason is: Democrats receive the same handouts and more importantly, the same treatment post-election through lobbying and influence at the points of legislation. Corporations, in their bold pursuit of profits, have figured out that the way to protect those profits isn't to change who gets elected against the will of the people, it's instead to work with the people who get elected to keep them there and serving at the whim of the people. This is why the Democratic punditry has me sort of confused. Among other reasons, the uncapped law also uncapped unions, who tend to be far more partisan or monolithic than corporations (in part because unlike many businesses other than monopolistic ones, unions are more dependent on government policy being specifically favorable, for reasons that I'm not sure were wise choices for unions to make). The one downside risk is that the amount of open money in play may allow some of the most contentious races to be more strongly anti-incumbent than at present.

Which is precisely why the ambivalence of independents is so strange. The one losing party in this case wasn't Democrats or Republicans per se. It was the party system that was dependent on direct corporate/union money for the purposes of political speech rather than the ability of that money to rally support for non-partisan purposes (and candidacies). The Perot campaign back in 1992/1996 was a demonstration of how this works. It seems to me in large part a reason why we ended up with tougher campaign finance laws because it scared the shit out of the major political parties to have some dwarf with funny ears and a ton of oil money siphoning off votes and political favors without major institutional support. Sure he was easy to mock on Saturday Night Live with his incessant use of charts and graphs, but not every semi-independent billionaire with a corporate arsenal behind them is so uncharismatic (see: Bloomberg, Michael). I think we as an observant public still have every reason to remain suspicious of corporate largess in politics. But if it produces some quality independent campaigns, or even quasi-independent campaigns (such as the amount of money raised by Congressman Paul's campaign in 2008), we might see some institutional shifts in the stances of the major parties as they continue to lose some importance in the election cycles (if not the actual political battlefields of statehouses and the Capitol building). Progress is sometimes slower than we wish. But when it comes, I don't see why people should be ambivalent about it because they didn't foresee it coming or even didn't take the precise form they wanted.