THE WAKE-UP CALL

• Share

Time makes more converts than reason, Thomas Paine advised, which helps explain why Bill Clinton, having spent his career in a deep embrace with campaign money, last week declared himself disgusted with the whole system and vowed to join a revolution. Elections, he said, "take too much money, and it takes too much time to raise the money, and it always raises questions." He will have to start answering those questions in the spring, when the Senate begins hearings into the Democratic Party's fishy campaign-finance machine. As an incumbent with high approval ratings, no need to run for office again, and an eye on his place in history, Clinton has become Washington's most conspicuous and sweaty convert to the cause of campaign-finance reform. So how much more hopeful does that eternally hopeless cause become?

His current circumstances make Clinton the rare politician who can argue for reform out of self-interest. Just last week voters were reminded again just how brazenly his White House has mixed fund raising with policymaking: documents released by the Administration on Friday show that the party organized a coffee at the White House that brought together its own top fund raisers with banking CEOS and a senior banking regulator, Eugene Ludwig, the Comptroller of the Currency. With this kind of revelation and the Senate's upcoming hearings into illegal contributions to his party, it is no wonder that Clinton is looking to change the subject-- from the ways in which the current laws may have been violated to the need to rewrite them. Until now, the problem with passing anything that would seriously change the way bribes flow through politics is that the politicians who would have to rewrite the laws have the greatest interest in not changing them. Arizona Republican John McCain and Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold have been hollering in the wilderness for two years, trying to persuade their fellow Senators to clean up the system. They would ban the unlimited soft-money contributions that both parties depend on (more than $250 million, a historic record, last year) and reward candidates who abide by voluntary spending limits.

Their bill, which Clinton supported only sotto voce last year, died quietly on the Senate floor. But this year the bill's other co-sponsor, Tennessee's Fred Thompson, happens to be the man who will preside over the Senate hearings. So the President made sure he sided with his putative prosecutor last week. He went straight into the lion's den--to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee--to praise the bill as "tough," "balanced" and "credible." He warned that "delay will mean the death of reform," which not long ago would have sounded like wishful thinking.

There were some indications last week that the President had really come around. Clinton invited McCain and Feingold to the White House for a 45-minute strategy meeting, his first such session with members of Congress for any piece of legislation this year. He promised to "put a tremendous amount of his own time into the issue," Feingold says. And he talked seriously about how to apply pressure to the bill's Republican opponents in Congress without turning the effort into a partisan bloodbath. "We have to be very diplomatic and very clear that both sides are going to have to give," Clinton told his guests.