BOSTON

THE PRIMARY campaign has taught us some lessons. The most important is that the Massachusetts "clean elections" referendum, of 1998, and the federal Campaign Reform Act, of 2002, were exposed to the law of unintended consequences, and must already be judged a sham.

The state's effort was favored by what James Michael Curley sarcastically called the "goo-goos": good-government types. The law set up what has proven to be a largely unworkable system of public campaign financing, and it cut the amount an individual may contribute to a candidate in a calendar year in half, from $1,000 to $500.

What has this wrought eight years later? Discounting Sen. Ted Kennedy and his two opponents, we had four multimillionaires -- Gabrieli, Healey, Mihos and Patrick -- running for governor, and one -- Deborah Goldberg -- running for lieutenant governor. Since the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that candidates' spending their own money to get elected is their right under the First Amendment, the vain, the ambitious and/or the patriotic rich have a huge newfound advantage.

Against this advantage, the poor, the working man and even the comfortably off don't stand a chance. In 1998, all five millionaires noted were political unknowns. As recently as January, Goldberg, Mihos and Patrick were unknown to most of the voters who went to the polls on Tuesday. By severely restricting the average citizen's ability to raise campaign funds, "clean elections" has created an unhealthy political distortion. In the name of more equality we have greatly exaggerated inequality.

One may disagree with the Supreme Court's bundling the buying of elections with free speech. (I happen to agree with the court, since we do not restrict rich people from publishing books and owning newspapers.) But given the court's ruling, the only practical solution is to vastly increase contribution limits for everyone else, or to do away with limits altogether. Otherwise, our politics are going medieval: In the future, electioneering will be a privileged hunting warren, wherein lords and ladies have the right to ride roughshod anywhere they want over the lands of effectively disfranchised cotters and muckers!

A second lesson we can take from the primary campaign is related to the first: the primacy of non-locally owned "local" television stations as the paid arbiter of campaigns. A statewide candidate, it seems, must pay to play. In early August, when Chris Gabrieli and Tom Reilly had been buying television advertisements for weeks, there was a moment when Deval Patrick's supporters feared he was sinking out of sight. He assured them that his own ads would be appearing before Labor Day, which they did.

When they came, the Patrick ads were only fair -- not as bad as Reilly's, but nowhere nearly as effective as Gabrieli's. But they were effective in that they kept his name in the game. What is sinister about this is that buying huge amounts of television advertising may be the only way to get the news departments of the stations raking in the candidates' dollars to continue to cover their campaigns. How different is this from the "rent" bookmakers used to have to pay Whitey Bulger to stay in business?

Time was when political candidates would advertise on radio and in local newspapers. Chris Gabrieli had the money to run some radio ads, but most of the millions that were spent in the Democratic primary went to a handful of television stations. There is no known quid pro quo of a station's favoring an "advertiser" in its news coverage. But if one compares the election coverage of commercial stations with the attention to all the statewide candidates on the program Greater Boston, on public station WGBH, one sees that the commercial stations do largely neglect those who don't advertise.

A third lesson we can take from the primary looks to the race against Republican Kerry Healey and independent Christy Mihos in November. It was the failure of all three Democrats to ever (that I heard) mention the recession and the budget crisis of 2002 and 2003. "Romney cut this, Romney cut that," they said, and, most pointedly, "Romney cut aid to cities and towns, leading to property-tax increases . . . So what if he didn't raise the income tax?"

However irritating Mr. Romney's behavior has become during the last year, any fair assessment would say that he handled a fiscal crisis he hadn't created as responsibly as anyone could have. In 2003, he had no choice but to further cut programs and aid to communities. (Gov. Jane Swift and the legislature had already made cuts.) But as the state's economy has improved, most programs have been restored to their 2002 levels plus inflation, and many have been significantly increased.

To mayors, state money is the best Exedrin for their chronic political headache, the demands of their employees. Over the next four years, increases will certainly be justified and will almost certainly be possible. But voters should be wary of open-ended promises.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal's editorial board.