The Maine Chance.

All the talk about reform is over, and the Presidential campaign is on, brought to you by the professionals from Wall Street and Big Oil. Beltway cynics smugly repeat the conventional wisdom: Campaign finance reform is dead on arrival; voters just don't care about it. What better illustration than the two corporate Presidential nominees: George W. Bush, now running as the "real reformer," and fundraising marathoner Al Gore, who scampers back and forth between unions and the chamber of commerce, dodging questions on global trade like a dithering squirrel.

But if money talks louder than ever in national politics, at the grassroots level, there's a quiet revolution going on. Voters in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Arizona are making radical changes in campaign finance laws, defying the conventional wisdom, and opening their wallets to pay for publicly funded campaigns.

After ten years of organizing, politicking, and a lengthy court battle, Maine's "clean-elections" system is up and running. A three-year legal challenge on free speech grounds by the National Right to Life Committee and the ACLU just failed, and 115 candidates for state office will take advantage of full public financing this fall.

On a recent Sunday afternoon in Portland, a small band of reformers celebrated at the home of Alison Smith of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections. Smith passed around a souvenir bar of soap and read a congratulatory letter from Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin. The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill has languished in Congress since 1995, Feingold pointed out in his letter. Even so, "In that same period of time, you gathered over 65,000 signatures in one day to put the Clean Election initiative on the ballot ... and put the system in place for the 2000 elections. What you have accomplished is truly inspiring and humbling."

The activists were in an upbeat mood. "After so many years, to have people using it, having the system work, it's just gratifying," said John Brautigam, executive director of the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund. The Maine law has given rise to a whole new crop of candidates who aren't wealthy or don't have friends and associates they can tap for big contributions. And, though it's a voluntary system, it also has real teeth: If a candidate refuses to play the game, his clean-money opponent automatically receives twice as much public funding--up to $10,000 for a house race and $40,000 for the state senate--without doing any fundraising legwork.

The implication that not participating means being "dirty" has persuaded about half of Maine's candidates for state office to run clean. Advocates hope this will diminish the power of the insurance companies and banks, paper mills and shipbuilding industries that exercise unseemly influence over Maine's legislature, squelching consumer protection efforts and tough environmental laws.

As an example, Brautigam points to a bill in the state senate that would have prohibited Maine from giving tax incentives to chronic violators of environmental laws. "There was a firestorm of protest from the business lobbyists," Brautigam says. "Eventually, it was whittled down so that it only covered businesses that had received criminal convictions. Even then, it only got four votes out of fifteen."

Over apple pie baked by one of the activists, members of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections reminisced about their first meeting back in 1991. "It was a motley group," said Marilyn Canavan, former director of the state's ethics commission. "There were gay and lesbian groups, the Christian Coalition, the AFL-CIO, and the League of Women Voters."

"The point was to get as broad a coalition as possible so we wouldn't be perceived as just the usual bunch of liberals wanting to spend your tax money," said Eric McCabe Johnson, co-chair of the group.

It took a long time to persuade the majority that public financing was the answer. Labor unions, which have historically spent a lot of money on lobbying, were particularly resistant.

"But when we looked at the numbers, business was outspending them by 10-to-1, 20-to-1, in every election," McCabe Johnson said. "They looked at that and said, `Gee, if we don't change this, we're losing the system. That got them on board.'"

The Maine law is not making revolutionary changes overnight. With the exception of four Green Party candidates, most people taking advantage of the system are still running as garden-variety Republicans and Democrats.

Take Glenn Cummings, a former high school teacher and the first person in history to qualify for public financing under the new law.

"Many people in the party cautioned me not to become a clean-elections candidate because, to their credit, they wanted me to win," says Cummings. He did it anyway, gathering the necessary fifty signatures and fifty $5 contributions, and pledging not to raise any more money on his own. Still, "I don't see that I'd be philosophically much different from the incumbent," says Cummings. On fingerprinting teachers, a hot-button issue in Maine, he takes the middle road: He opposes it for veterans, but supports it for new hires.

But if Maine hasn't transformed politics yet, it has opened the door to a more democratic form of government. One of Cummings's opponents in the general election will be Green Independent Party candidate David Palmer, a recent college grad who moved to Portland to try his first political race, thanks to the clean elections law.

The winds of change are blowing even harder through Maine's neighboring state of Vermont, where a stricter campaign finance reform law was passed by the legislature.

Vermont's law imposes compulsory spending limits, forces incumbents to spend 15 percent less than their challengers, and sets no floor on qualifying contributions. Maine's law, by contrast, was deliberately crafted to withstand a First Amendment challenge in court.

"Our law is stronger," says Vermont's Progressive Party candidate for governor, Anthony Pollina, who is collecting $1, $2, even sixty-cent qualifying contributions for his campaign. "Since it was passed by the legislature, and not by voter referendum, as it went through the legislative process it just got stronger and stronger. The legislators said, `If we're giving public financing, we're going to have to limit spending. Otherwise, we're just throwing money away.'"

Critics of the Maine law say it has attracted so much interest from liberal foundations, which are promoting it as a model, that it may crowd out more sweeping types of reform. If other states adopt the referendum language devised in Maine, voters may never get a shot at the kind of comprehensive reform Vermont is imposing, Pollina suggests. Then again, they won't find themselves on the wrong side of the Constitution, either.

Whichever approach works best, statewide reform efforts are building momentum for federal efforts to wrest power from corporations and return control of the government to the voters.

Of course, there are dissenters. The ACLU abhors the limits on political contributions as a direct hit against the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. On the other side of the issue there's Peter Kellman, a labor activist and member of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (www.poclad.org). Kellman thinks campaign finance law should directly tackle the notion that money equals political speech. He equates Maine's $5 contributions to a poll tax and says the Maine law "does nothing" to stop corporate power. "The way corporations control things is by controlling the parameters of debate," Kellman says. As long as lobbyists write legislation and companies dominate the airwaves with issue ads, corporate power will remain unchecked.

Nonetheless, the growing consciousness of corporate domination of politics and the statewide efforts for democratic reform belie the cynicism in Washington. What a shock it would be for politicians and lobbyists if they woke up one day to an organized movement for change from below.

Ruth Conniff is Washington Editor of The Progressive.