A Promise To Deliver

Al Gore urged his audience to hate the sin but love the sinner as he unveiled new campaign funding proposals Monday. He went to Marquette University, a Jesuit school in Milwaukee, and humbly said, "I may be an imperfect messenger for this cause," but Gov. George W. Bush is no messenger at all. "He is committed to defending the status quo," the vice president said.

The choice of Wisconsin was not accidental. The state's junior Democratic senator, Russ Feingold, is the cosponsor, along with John McCain, of a controversial campaign finance reform bill that has become the rallying point for reformniks, although it's been knocked down in the Senate several times.

Perhaps Gore's fantasy would be to have McCain endorse him; since that's not going to happen, the vice president basked in the next best thing.

At the rally, McCain's name was repeated like a mantra. Gore promised that, if elected, he would introduce the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill on his first day in office and push its passage by using the "bully pulpit" of the presidency.

McCain-Feingold would ban so-called "soft money", a major step towards overhauling the campaign funding system. In addition to giving the bill a leg up, Gore also wants to require Internet disclosure of lobbyists' activities. And he'd like to force television broadcasters to give candidates free air time and to discourage them from running special interest ads (though it might be interesting to learn what's defined as a special interest and what isn't).

Perhaps most spectacularly, he wants to establish something called the Democracy Endowment, a $7.1 billion entity whose interest earnings would go to support general election campaigns. Gore hopes private citizens, unions and corporations alike will give money to the endowment, without being able to earmark it for specific candidates or parties. Contributions to the endowment would be 100 percent tax deductible. The endowment would apply to campaigns for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, not to presidential campaigns, which are already publicly funded.

Bush, meanatime, issued a statement saying no one would take Gore seriously until he "stops withholding information" about his fund-raising efforts in 1996. Besides, Bush says, his plan is better because it would ban soft money contributions from unions and corporations (but leave it for individuals) and would raise the amount permitted for hard money contributions - the donations made directly to a specific candidate.

Feingold, who spoke before Gore at the Marquette event, parried Bush by trying to label him as a politician who is afraid of reform, saying "It's a common device of those who seek to thwart reform to insist on the perfection of the reformer; they do so for no other reason than to hide the greater evil of continuing things the way they are."

The real devil "is in the details" of Gore's plan, says Larry Makison, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. Gore "deserves points for coming out with an idea that hasn't been mentioned before," namely the endowment. But unanswered, Makinson said Monday, is the question of why anyone would contribute to it.

Makinson points out the fund would "be a real test of why people give soft money. If they give it for good democracy, then they should give lots of money to the endowment fund. If they give it to get legislative results, there's no reason in the world to give to the fund."

The concept of free television time might prove a sticking point, as well. In the past, Congress has considered bills that would oblige broadcasters to hand over the airwaves to candidates, and those bills have never gone far. Broadcasters form a powerful lobby.

Besides, as Makinson observes, five minutes of TV time per candidate per day, as Gore wants, adds up to large chunks of time in places like New York City, where television markets reach over 20 Congressional districts.

Moreover, if Gore wins in November, who's to say that "the most sweeping campaign finance reform in history," as he puts its, will pass Congress?

The McCain-Feingold bill has had an unhappy career. Legislators may know that a new CBS News poll shows over 80 percent of voters think something's got to give when it comes to campaign finance, but Makinson says most members of Congress "are deathly afraid of changing too much" when it comes to finding the money to pay for a successful re-election bid.

Presumably, Gore knows as well as anybody how hard it is to say "No" when your pocketbook says "Yes."