A Spoiler's Crusade: Senator John McCain and "the system".

At the weekly strategy lunch Senate Republicans hold in the Mansfield Room of the Capitol, John McCain always sits at a table with the same two senators, Chuck Hagel and Fred Thompson. Hagel and Thompson are among the proud, the few, who haven't been turned off by McCain's self-righteousness, or temper, or stubbornness, or some combination of all three-the traits that have made him, at least in the Senate chamber, perhaps the least popular "most popular politician in America" ever. McCain often sits with his back to the rest of his colleagues. "He's bigger than the GOP," says one Republican senator sarcastically, "bigger than Bush."

And getting bigger. Before George W. Bush had even given his victory speech following the Florida imbroglio, McCain was on CNN making one of his there-will-be-blood-on-the-floor pledges to push campaign-finance reform. Before Bush had even introduced his initial education-reform package, McCain was badgering majority leader Trent Lott to give him 21 legislative days immediately, to debate campaign finance. McCain settled for two weeks, but he insisted that they come in March, not after Easter, as Lott suggested in order to give the Senate enough time to consider Bush's education package and budget.

John McCain, who at his best on the campaign trail last year held town-hall meetings that were mini patriotic revivals, is becoming as small as his cause. This contemporary Teddy Roosevelt (as his boosters would have it) is disrupting the passage of a substantive reform agenda-education, tax cuts, social services-in a rush, among other things, to refine the definition of what constitutes "coordination" between candidates and political groups. Campaign-finance reform is for politicians what the milk compact is for dairy farmers. It is an adjustment to a set of arcane rules that never should have been written in the first place and that no one outside of the directly affected interests feels compelled to pay attention to, let alone understand. As an intellectual matter, it is a travesty, a bad answer to the wrong question; as a political matter, it is a dud, a nonissue hyped into seeming salience by the press; and even as a matter of McCain's own stated goals, it is a contradiction, a check on exactly the active citizenship he seeks to promote.

The McCain-Feingold bill has a pedigree. It was first introduced in 1995, as a reprise of the Boren-Mitchell bill that those two Democratic senators had perennially introduced prior to retiring in 1994. The crown jewel of the bill was a limit on spending by congressional candidates-deemed the only way to squeeze special interests out of politics. This provision had the disadvantage of probably being unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court had ruled that candidate spending is an essential free-speech right. So, McCain-Feingold evolved until it assumed its current form, with limits not on candidates, but on party "soft money" fundraising and on expenditures by outside groups-deemed, again, the only way to squeeze special interests out of politics.

In light of its history, the bill can be seen as an attempt to limit and regulate something in the hopes of reforming-candidates? parties? what?-something else. In fact, the same reformers who formerly wanted to enmesh candidates in constraining regulations now sell their plan as a way to protect and empower individual candidates. "Growing numbers of members running for reelection feel they're losing control of their campaigns," McCain chief of staff Mark Salter has explained.

The foremost target of the current McCain-Feingold bill is the parties. They raise "unregulated" soft money, dollars that can't be spent directly on the promotion of federal candidates, but can be spent on "issue advocacy"-ads that don't expressly urge the election of a federal candidate-and various party-building activities, from voter registration to supporting state and local candidates. Soft money is considered problematic both because it supposedly is unregulated-in truth, various FEC rulings affect it-and because it involves fantastic sums.

Soft money is an artifact of the Supreme Court's landmark Buckley v. Valeo decision (1976), which tossed out most of the post-Watergate election reforms. The Court made a distinction between contributions and expenditures. Limiting how much a candidate could spend would effectively limit the amount of his speech, thus constituting an impermissible infringement on his First Amendment rights. Direct contributions to a candidate, on the other hand, if too large, might create an appearance of corruption, a fact that has to be balanced against the free-speech rights of the contributor. This jurisprudence created the current two-tiered system, by upholding a stringent $1,000 limit on direct contributions to candidates ("hard money") and allowing a free-for-all with everything else (soft money).

Reformers argue that the huge soft-money contributions create exactly the kind of appearance that worried the Court about direct contributions. The problem with this is that, since soft money goes to the parties and not to individual candidates, no one can answer the question of who exactly (Jim Nicholson?) is being corrupted. This is why McCain has to argue that "the system" is rotten in a general, unspecified, yet-to-be-spelled-out way, and that "everyone" is corrupt, all the way from the starched-up Orrin Hatch to the mobbed-up Jim Traficant. But saying everyone is corrupt is really a way of saying no one in particular is corrupt. McCain's nemesis, Sen. Mitch McConnell, illustrated this point when he suggested that all senators-not just members of the Ethics Committee-report any evidence of corruption as soon as they find it. McCain has yet to come forward.

An ordinary politician might suppose that certain behavior isn't so nefarious if he is engaging in it himself. McCain apparently isn't so small-minded. He now has his own "leadership PAC," after trying to ban PACs. In Michigan during the primaries, he launched just the sort of "anonymous communication"-his "Catholic Voter Alert" calls against Bush-that he had railed against, and would bewail again when he was at the receiving end of "Republicans for Clean Air" ads in New York. His latest bill would ban politicians from writing letters to raise soft money for outside advocacy groups. But since 1999, Citizens Against Government Waste has been using a McCain fundraising letter, which coolly warns that pork-barrel spending could cost your children their lives!

In the end, the case against soft money boils down to the old saw that there is "just too much money in the system." Which means effectively that too much money is being spent on advertising, on voter registration, on get-out-the-vote efforts-an odd complaint for an advocate, like McCain, of increased political involvement. Politics is really important, just don't spend anything on it! Some McCainiacs have opened up another line of attack: that soft money favors the Democrats. (For his part, McCain maintains that enacting campaign-finance reform is the only way W. can hope to pass the rest of his agenda, which, of course, is why the helpful senator is in such a hurry to get to it.)

The parties have indeed achieved a rough parity in soft money, but this funding is still more important to the GOP. It's a way of getting the party's message out despite the media environment, which broadly favors the Democrats. And it's a way of counteracting the muscle of the unions. A soft-money ban would wipe corporations from the playing field, but unions could still leverage their manpower and other resources for the Democrats. And raising the limit on hard money-where the GOP has an advantage-probably wouldn't make up the loss in soft money, since most hard-money contributions are tiny.

Even if there were a total soft-money ban, big money would still figure in politics. Parallel organizations would spring up to do the traditional work of the parties. This is why reformers can't "just" ban soft money, but must chase after all possible outlets for political money in an effort to seal the system. As the net of regulations gets wider and wider, the First Amendment problems become starker and starker. Thus the constitutional vulnerability of McCain's efforts to hamper the activities (especially the "issue advocacy" advertising) of citizen groups. Those efforts have also created his worst headache politically, as conservative-grassroots groups scream their opposition.

This is perhaps why, in late 1999, before the primary campaign, McCain dropped such provisions from his bill. He was happy to take credit for this in a letter to state right-to-life groups last January: "During previous campaign finance reform debates, the National Right to Life Washington office was severely critical of proposed restrictions on issue advocacy ads. In order to address this concern, the legislation I brought to the floor this year had no such restrictions on issue advocacy advertisements" (emphasis in original). McCain has evidently stopped addressing this concern, since all the restrictions are right back in his bill.

McCain-Feingold would make it illegal for corporations-a category that includes most advocacy groups-and unions to engage in "electioneering communications" (ads that mention a candidate's name) within 60 days of an election. This is how incumbents, in the words of McCain's Mark Salter, hope to regain "control" of their campaigns. Also, since spending that outside groups coordinate with a candidate is subject to strict hard-money treatment, McCain-Feingold changes the rules to make it almost impossible for such groups to avoid such coordination. For instance, simply sharing professional services-"polling, media advice, fund-raising," etc., etc.-would constitute coordination.

The soft-money portions of McCain-Feingold will certainly invite constitutional challenge, since they involve a whole new swath of election regulation. But the provisions affecting independent groups drive straight into the teeth of Buckley. "As long as persons and groups eschew expenditures that in express terms advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate, they are free to spend as much as they want to promote the candidate and his views," the Court wrote in that case. Why McCain feels compelled to do this-distracting from his soft-money ban, which is the easiest sell politically-is unclear: Does he secretly crave a veto, so the "crusade," as he calls it, can go on and on? Does he want to stick it to the "shadowy" groups that ran ads against him in the primaries?

Of course, McCain has said he has a "mandate" to push campaign-finance reform to the hilt. (His aides now say he regrets that formulation.) This is an idea that relies on the pervasive misunderstanding that McCain's success in the Republican primaries somehow stemmed from, say, the "electioneering communications" provisions in McCain-Feingold. A nice expression of this mistake was a New York Times op-ed piece by William Kristol and Jeffrey Bell after Rick Lazio and Hillary Clinton inked their voluntary soft-money ban last year. They argued that conservatives would have to reconcile their disdain for campaign-finance reform with their desire to beat Hillary, since Lazio had latched on to the soft-money issue that had carried McCain to such heights.

This analysis seemed amusingly implausible at the time, but proved flatly ridiculous in light of Hillary's 12-point stomping of Lazio. The Lazio soft-money McCain-style juggernaut failed to materialize, for a couple of reasons: 1) Lazio is not a war hero with an electrifying stage presence; 2) the huddled masses of New York care less about the intricacies of election law (Lazio's message) than they do about more mundane things, like, oh, jobs upstate (Hillary's message). As pollster Andrew Kohut pointed out, even among McCain's own supporters in the Republican primaries, only a small minority cited campaign-finance reform as their foremost concern (including in New Hampshire and Michigan).

No, McCain's crusade is an idiosyncratic, not a popular one. Perhaps what drives him is the same thing that prompts him to turn his back on his colleagues at lunch. McCain is just not a party guy. Political parties are great American institutions, perhaps the most vibrant associations in the country, admirably committed, more or less, to certain principles. But they are constant checks on moral vanity, requiring their supporters to make grubby compromises and stand united with crude colleagues, in the expectation that eventually some good will come of it. But McCain, who prizes his purity above all, will have none of it, and seems to resent even the expectation that he be a team player.

So, his bill attacks the political parties, he pushes it in defiance of the wishes of a newly inaugurated president of his own party, he holds town-hall meetings in states of vulnerable Republican senators to embarrass them for opposing his bill, even as partisan control of the Senate hangs in the balance. As his Republican colleagues struggle to deliver on Bush's promises, McCain focuses on his own. He may well succeed in passing a campaign-finance bill this year. To what end is unclear, since it will quickly land in the courts, and no restrictions will be extensive enough actually to vanquish, or even much dent, "big money." For his trouble, he probably gets a press release ("McCain Reforms Washington!") and perhaps a new Supreme Court decision bearing his name.

McCain, the hero, the patriot, should be bigger than this. He's not.