Anyone hearing this?

The details of the campaign-finance scandals that have come to light during hearings before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs reveal some of the worst perversions of democracy to emerge in recent history. Yet the hearings have elicited a collective yawn from jaded Beltway insiders.

The major networks have declined to broadcast the hearings. Mainstream news magazines downplayed them. Newsweek gave the Andrew Cunanan-Gianni Versace murder story seventeen pages in its July 28 issue; the campaign-finance scandal got a scant one page. The same week, Time's ratio was sixteen-to-one. In a recent radio interview, David Brooks of the Weekly Standard summed up a common theme among Washington journalists. He claimed that Americans are so fed up with the legal fundraising practices of both parties, the question of when and where politicians cross the line into illegality is academic.

Sure, people are skeptical of money-grubbing politicians. And it's abundantly clear that it's time to reform our campaign-finance system. But the kind of paralyzing cynicism Brooks describes says more about Washington than it does about the rest of America.

Witness the reaction to Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, whose specialty has been raising millions of dollars for the Republicans -- in part by setting up a nonprofit front group called the National Policy Forum to channel funds to his party. Brooks and other commentators praised Barbour's "masterful" testimony before the Senate committee. Confronted with evidence of illegal and unethical fundraising, Barbour simply denied any wrongdoing. And if there was anything unethical in what he did, he didn't know it at the time, he added. One of Barbour's lawyers claimed admiringly that his client's performance was on a par with Oliver North's during the Iran-contra hearings. There's a telling comparison.

Washington lawyers, pundits, and politicians may not consider the recent revelations about fundraising scandals a big deal. So what if our elected officials prostitute themselves? So what if money buys political access? What else is new?

But for those of us who like to think we live in a democracy, the revelations are both outrageous and dramatic.

Among the things you're not seeing on TV: testimony about suitcases and grocery bags stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars delivered to the Democratic National Committee and the President's legal-defense fund; FBI charts that depict a massive money-laundering scheme involving campaign contributions from China; and a parade of bandits and hustlers who bought their way into the White House.

"I don't know if a novelist would get away with writing a story like this," Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at one point during the hearings.

Take the curious case of Charlie Trie, an old Friend Of Bill who ran a Chinese restaurant in Little Rock, Arkansas, where then-Governor Clinton liked to eat lunch. Trie, who is now on the lam in China, came to Washington, D.C., when his friend moved into the White House.

Trie, who ran a series of failed business ventures, allegedly used a network of bank accounts from these shell groups to launder some $905,000 in illegal foreign donations to the Democratic Party. The donations originated with Chinese real estate tycoon Ng Lap Seng, who also goes by the name Mr. Wu.

FBI Agent Jerome Campane told the Thompson committee about a meeting between Wu and Trie in a Little Rock hotel room. "Trie said, `I need some money for expenses,' and Wu opened a suitcase full of cash and gave $20,000 to Trie," Campane said.

Trie's contributions, which have been returned, made him a managing trustee of the Democratic National Committee. He paid twenty-three visits to the White House between 1993 and 1996, and the President appointed him to the Asian-Pacific Trade Commission, sending him on trips to Asia to drum up U.S. business. It is not clear what Trie's patron Wu got in return for the money he funneled to the Clinton Administration through Trie. But it is clear that, for a small-time hustler, Trie gained enormous access to the Administration.

Trie also channeled a large amount of money to Clinton's legal-defense fund -- much of it laundered through personal checks from individual contributors who were reimbursed through foreign bank accounts.

Some of the most colorful testimony at the hearings came when Michael Cardozo, who directs the Presidential Legal Expense Trust, described meeting Trie. Trie arrived at Cardozo's office and emptied a manila envelope stuffed with nearly half a million dollars on his desk, Cardozo said. Later, Trie reappeared with a grocery bag stuffed with money. "I thought, my God, he's got a million dollars this time," Cardozo said. In fact. it was only $179,000 -- the bag also contained various "novelty items," Cardozo said. These turned out to be "inflatable devices you hit with your fist and they inflate into the form of a Coke bottle, or a cushion with `United Airlines' on it that you can sit on at a football game." Trie was hoping Cardozo's firm might like to help him market these items. Cardozo declined.

Because Clinton's legal-defense fund returned Trie's contributions, there is no criminal prosecution under way. The trustees of the fund appeared to show considerably more scruples than their charges when it came to accepting suspicious contributions.

As Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, pointed out to Cardozo, "You smelled a rat when you met Charlie Trie. The trustees smelled a rat. But the folks at the White House allowed him to enter twenty-three times."

The Charlie Trie story demonstrates that the Clinton Administration is open to any hustler with a bag of cash -- whether it's Jun Wang, the notorious Chinese arms dealer, or Charlie Trie, whoopie-cushion speculator.

Testimony by Yue F. Chu and Xi Ping Wang, confirmed this. Chu and Wang seem to be naive pawns in a sinister operation. Both women are immigrants from China who work in the restaurant business and are associates of Wu and Trie. Both wrote checks to the DNC for thousands of dollars and were reimbursed by another member of Wu's money-laundering network, Keshi Zhan. The two women testified that Keshi Zhan (who has fled to China) told them to sign over the checks, and that they did not even know what the letters "DNC" stood for.

"You see, I don't speak English," Chu explained through a translator. Chu answered the Senators' questions in a tiny voice, as enlarged photographs of her checks, with puppies and kittens printed on the background, were displayed on screens around the hearing room.

Chu said her husband told her they had to help raise $25,000 for his boss, Wu, because "he had to buy a ticket to pass the gate to the White House." So Chu signed two checks for $12,500 and $7,500. Wang contributed the rest of the ticket price, with a check for $5,000. She testified that her cousin told her "the boss needs the money for a ticket to pass the White House gate."

The toll booth at the White House gate is the real story to emerge so far from these hearings. Perhaps, with further digging, a connection between campaign donations and Most Favored Nation trading status for China or other business favors may emerge. Perhaps it won't. But there's enough sleaze here to warrant serious concern.

The hearings have provided an opportunity for a series of sanctimonious speeches from Senators who appear to have suddenly discovered what a rotten system they are part of. (This after helping to break all fundraising records in the last elections, scooping up an average of $3.6 million each.)

"The whole system stinks, that's the only word for it," declared Senator John Glenn, Democrat of Ohio, former recipient of tainted contributions from convicted savings-and-loan shark Charles Keating. Glenn slammed "soft-money" contributions to political parties in particular, and announced, "If at the end of the year we haven't changed the whole system that spawned this whole mess, we will not have done our job."

Senator Thompson explained that the hearings "may all boil down to the insatiable desire for money and what people will do to get it. It's all very troubling." Thompson agreed with Glenn that "we should take a look at what we can do about soft money."

Senator Max Cleland, Democrat of Georgia, went so far as to inquire of FBI agent Campane, "Do you think our political system would be better off if we banned soft money?"

Campane declined to venture an opinion. It wasn't his specialty, he said.

Reform is not exactly the Senators' specialty, either. But if they are embarrassed enough by public revelations like those that have emerged during the Thompson hearings, they might be forced by the sheer disgust of the American public to move in the right direction.

But first the public needs to hear about it.