DATE: Saturday, October 11, 1997            TAG: 9710110024

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   61 lines

CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Congress has just finished its latest game of charades regarding campaign finance. Members of each party have spent the last sevrral months accusing the other side of sleaze, illegality and legally-permitted corruption. They're both right. But campaign finance reform legislation is dead again after this week's failure to pass McCain-Feingold II.

It's possible that the flawed legislation deserved to die, but that doesn't mean reform isn't needed. In fact, too many politicians spend far too muchtime chasing too much money. Money buys access and aceess has a way of turning into favors asked and favors granted.

The Clinton campaign took some of the worst practices to new epths, but the behavior is bipartisan and pursuing Clinton and Gore won't stop the sleaze in the future and is hypocritical. The refusal of Congress to craft reform legislation demonstrates incumbents who profiit from the present game aren't about to change the rules. Still, some lessons are obvious:

Soft money should be banned. Though supposedly for party-building activities only, soft money has turned into a gigantic loophole that permits unrestricted contributons that escape scrutiny or limitation and that directly advance the fortunes of individual candidates. Any funds so used ought to be subject to hard money limits and full disclosure should be required.

Banning soft money leaves unanswered the issue of third party ads. This dodge permits third parties - the Committee for the Preservation of Sleazy Campaigns - to fund ads that attack one candidate and promote another. The infamous Willie Horton ad was one such, allegely devised, bought and paid for by a group with no connection to the Bush campaign. But seeing is belieiving.

Unfortunately, any attempt to regulate such phony front groups risks imposing gags on legitimate third parties - interest groups or individuals who ought to have every right to put in their two cents worth at election time. Limits in McCain-Feingold on who could speak or when they could do it raised legitimately troubling free speech questions.

A call for quick reporting of contributions makes perfect sense, however. Through the magic of the Internet, fund-raising reports can be published to the world as fast as money is received. They should be. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, let voters know who's trying to buy an election before it's over.

Free speech is one thing; expensive speech another. Candidates can't be competitive in modern races without running hugely expensive TV ads. In an earlier draft of McCain-Feingold, a call for free or cut-rate TV time was included.

It was eliminated but deserves to come back to life. Sen. Alen Specter, R-Pa., helped kill it by making the unpersuasive case that requiring free TV time would be ``a taking of property, which is unconstitutional.''

That's absurd. The TV stations don't own the public airwaves that they use to enrich themselves. The public does. And expecting TV to provide a public service in return is hardly onerous.

McCain-Feingold had other flaws and if enacted might have had unintended consequences. But it was a noble effort. The public must keep demanding a clean up until they get it, though any bill able to attract bipartisan support is likely to be too dilute to have much effect. Still, if the alternative is business as usual - the money chase followed by the porkfest - even flawed or fragmentary reform is worth a try.

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