I'm ambivalent.
There's a problem with unknown or poorly disclosed groups, or individuals, putting up slanderous or deliberately misleading advertisements on TV and radio.
There's a problem that conventional wisdom is that election campaigns are too expensive and that the money chase is corrupting our elections.
The FCC only has jurisdiction over over-the-air broadcasts. It can't regulate cable, the internet, etc., as directly as it can broadcasters.
As someone in a Supreme Court argument once noted, wealth isn't speech. Similarly, just because someone can't buy air time (for whatever reason) doesn't mean their First Amendment rights are being infringed.
Rolling all this stuff together, I'm of the opinion that trying to regulate political TV ads is a lost cause. There will always be loop-holes, and always be ways to game the system.
Probably the simplest solution is to make a condition of obtaining a commercial over-the-air license is that the awardee provide free airtime for candidates in local, state and national elections. The devil's in the details, though.
While publicly financed elections has an appeal, without a free-airtime, it's hard to see how it will act as a restraint on spending. The political consultants have an interest in driving up the price of elections every year, as they presumably often get a cut of the spending in their consulting fees. Plus, who decides who gets money and how much money they get?
Maybe [link|http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/washing.htm|Washington had it right, after all]:
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.