AL GORE'S CASH MACHINE

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Like the divinity student he once was, Vice President Al Gore took refuge in his work last week, avoiding reporters and talking about trade, global warming and America's great rivers--anything but campaign-finance reform. Nearly everyone else was talking about it, though. Republicans uncovered new evidence that Gore might have known that some of the "soft" money he solicited in 46 telephone calls to donors in 1995 and 1996 wound up in the wrong bank accounts at the Democratic National Committee--raising questions about the legality of the calls themselves.

For the second week in a row, Gore clung to his defenses: that he didn't know where the cash had ended up, and that he had broken no laws with his fervent fund raising on federal property. Gore, say his allies, cares far more about fiber optics and digital libraries than soft money and matching funds. On ethical issues, said a longtime aide, "he never gets close to the line."

Maybe not, but perhaps that's because he's always had Peter Knight. One of Gore's longtime advisers and his principal fund raiser, Knight tends to the darker side of Gore's world. It was Knight, the Clinton-Gore campaign manager in 1996, who prepared many of the "call sheets" that Gore worked from when dialing for dollars. Now, after Attorney General Janet Reno has begun a preliminary review of those calls under the independent-counsel law, government sources tell TIME that Justice is also probing Knight's multilayered connections to a Massachusetts manufacturer that won $33 million in federal contracts and regulatory breaks from the Clinton Administration while the firm and its officers raised or gave a total of $132,000 for the President and his party in the last election.

Knight, working as the firm's lobbyist, smoothed the way for the donations, the contracts and an unusual personal visits to the firm's headquarters by Gore himself. The little-known Knight probe, under way for some time, could draw the Vice President deeper into a scandal that has its roots in Bill Clinton's last election but may have its greatest impact on Al Gore's next. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, Gore's approval rate dipped to 51%, the lowest level since March. If the next presidential election were held today, pitting Gore against Texas Governor George W. Bush, 44% of those polled said they'd vote for Bush, vs. 43% for Gore.

Successful politicians have long relied on discreet aides to perform some of the onerous money-related chores of modern political life. But Knight is the epitome of a new generation of moneymen in both parties whose work doesn't end with the election; it really just begins. Fund raisers who once shelved their donor lists between elections now turn donors into clients on whose behalf they lobby the very same politicians for whom they were raising cash just weeks before. It's a seamless loop of influence peddling--donors get access, candidates get money; and lobbyists get rich.