A New Day Dawning

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For McCain and Feingold, who brush aside such alarms, it was a moment for celebration, and not only because they were poised to win a lonely battle they had fought for years. The two weeks of debate that ended Friday surprised many veterans of the Senate's joyless forced marches. The debate was both civil and principled; people listened, and some even changed their mind, persuaded by new arguments and old loyalties to make a leap of faith. No one knew as the week went on how it would turn out; every day brought another threat to the bill's survival, and the best head counters in the chamber were stumped about who would act as saboteur, who would turn out to be a savior.

McCain and Feingold thought they had a good idea who their enemies were. McConnell never pretended to see the smallest merit in anything they proposed. To him the debate is a basic free-speech issue: if people want to spend their money supporting candidates or making TV ads about a candidate's environmental record, that is their prerogative. But as the week began, it was not McConnell who posed the greatest threat. It was, of all people, Minnesota Democrat Paul Wellstone, the most earnest, make-the-world-a-better-place Senator of all.

If you really want to reform the system, Wellstone argued, you can't just shuffle the money from parties to outside groups. It wasn't enough to limit issues ads by unions and corporations in the last weeks of a campaign; he proposed extending the limits to all advocacy groups, from the Christian Coalition to the Feminist Majority Foundation. But any limit on political speech makes First Amendment purists queasy, and his amendment, reformers feared, would never pass constitutional muster. And that might one day be all it would take to kill the entire bill--if the Senate passed a "non-severability" amendment, the great deal breaker that meant that if any part of the bill was ruled unconstitutional, the entire thing would be thrown out. Wellstone's amendment was so constitutionally dubious that it invited the courts to strike it down--and, potentially, the whole soft-money ban along with it. For McConnell, that made it perfect.

The wooden benches with the red velvet cushions in the back of the Senate chamber are where staff members sit for hours, partly to follow the debate, partly because it's the best place to pick up intelligence. Mark Buse, 35, has been doing that job for McCain for 17 years. He became so adept at rooting out legislative pork that McCain calls him "the Ferret." Listening to other staff members gossip on Monday afternoon, Buse picked up his first hint of trouble. Both McConnell and Texan Phil Gramm, another reform foe, were going to vote with Wellstone. Why would Gramm and McConnell vote with a liberal? Suddenly Buse understood: Wellstone's amendment was a poison pill, with the potential to kill the whole measure. He rushed to warn McCain.

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