A New Day Dawning

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McCain knew the worst was happening when he came into the Senate chamber for the vote. "Gramm was standing down in the well, grabbing people and talking to them, going back into the cloakroom," he says. And it wasn't just fellow Republicans plotting against the bill. McCain and Feingold realized that some Democrats privately wanted to see the bill die. It had been easy to support in the past, when it had no chance of passing. But in the 2000 election the Democrats had become as slick as the Republicans at raising soft money; do away with it, and all that would be left is hard money, where the G.O.P. still holds a big advantage. Some Democrats approached McConnell quietly, he told TIME, with private pleas to "stop this from happening" and "pull some rabbit out of the hat one more time." Wellstone's amendment was the ticket. "I viewed it as another unconstitutional ornament we could put on this tree," McConnell says. "I was trying to get as many problems into the bill I could, so that if we ended up in court, we had a target-rich environment." He went to colleagues and said, "This is grotesquely unconstitutional. Please vote for it."

In the end a strange alliance of pro- and anti-reform purists--27 Democrats and 24 Republicans--passed Wellstone's amendment. Never the most skilled inside player, McCain realized he had been blindsided. He began to suspect that even Democrats who had voted with him, like minority leader Tom Daschle, were secretly against him. The next morning, as he boarded the little subway train that runs between the Senate office buildings and the Capitol, McCain was muttering, as much to himself as anyone, "Game face on..."

If on Monday McCain was killed by a friend, on Tuesday it was his turn to kill one. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, fellow war hero, was one of the only Senators at McCain's side during his ill-fated presidential bid. Yet now he was the one standing in McCain's way. Hagel was sponsor of an alternative bill that instead of banning soft money would limit it: his measure would allow couples to donate $540,000 in each two-year election cycle to candidates and parties, not much of a brake on the current system. McCain and Feingold knew that Hagel had the quiet encouragement of the White House and that if his bill passed as proposed, theirs was as good as dead.

As it turned out, Hagel did McCain and Feingold a favor. He knew there were Senators who didn't like all of his bill, and he feared being outmaneuvered; so he divided it into three parts and let the Senate vote on each. At first Feingold and McCain wondered what he was up to. "Then I realized, oh, this is great!" Feingold recalls. "We're going to finally get the vote we've been wanting to have for five years--up or down on soft money. That was the turning point."

As the roll call proceeded and the number of Senators voting to reject Hagel's soft-money provision grew, McCain and Feingold headed to the press gallery, and Feingold checked with the clerk. It was 59 to 40, with one Senator out.

"Who is it?" he asked.

Joe Lieberman. "My fists went up in the air, and I went '60'--the magic number, a filibuster-proof repudiation of the soft-money system," Feingold says. "Some tough things happened after that, but that was when we showed we had control of the Senate on this bill."