Follow The Soft Money

They can preach reform and sign away the system, but the candidates of campaign 2000 are still running the most expensive political race in history; a race fueled by soft money.

"It's unregulated, and it's a huge amount of money. We estimate over half-a-billion dollars in 2000 alone," says Scott Harshbarger, president of Common Cause.

The election year isn't even here yet, reports CBS News Correspondent Diana Olick, but through June 1999, Democrats raised $26 million in soft money, while Republicans raised $31 million.

And where's it all coming from? Since 1991, the top 10 donors to Republicans are big corporations, which gave over $30 million. The Democrats got $24 million from their top 10, six of which are labor unions.

So why does a company like AT&T give almost a million dollars to both parties this year?

AT&T is in a major competitive play about the Internet, is in a major competitive play about how the markets will be regulated," says Harshbarger. "Who decides that? The President and Congress."

But while McCain and Bradley were vowing to rid their campaigns of that kind of special interest money, frontrunner George W. Bush today gave little hope he would jump on their bandwagon any time soon.

"We cannot afford a version of campaign finance reform that unilaterally disarms our Republican Party and our conservative principles," he said.

And the chairman of the Republican Party defended soft money as a right of free speech.

"I think parties have a right to express themselves as well as citizens and any other organizations and that's what we do," said RNC chairman Jim Nicholson.

McCain's crusade to reform the system has cost him support from his own party leadership. And that points out the problem: how do you change the system from within when the parties and the people they elect are all addicted to it?