THE WAKE-UP CALL

By NANCY GIBBS

Time makes more converts than reason, Thomas Paine advised, which helps explain why Bill Clinton, having spent his career in a deep embrace with campaign money, last week declared himself disgusted with the whole system and vowed to join a revolution. Elections, he said, "take too much money, and it takes too much time to raise the money, and it always raises questions." He will have to start answering those questions in the spring, when the Senate begins hearings into the Democratic Party's fishy campaign-finance machine. As an incumbent with high approval ratings, no need to run for office again, and an eye on his place in history, Clinton has become Washington's most conspicuous and sweaty convert to the cause of campaign-finance reform. So how much more hopeful does that eternally hopeless cause become?

His current circumstances make Clinton the rare politician who can argue for reform out of self-interest. Just last week voters were reminded again just how brazenly his White House has mixed fund raising with policymaking: documents released by the Administration on Friday show that the party organized a coffee at the White House that brought together its own top fund raisers with banking CEOS and a senior banking regulator, Eugene Ludwig, the Comptroller of the Currency. With this kind of revelation and the Senate's upcoming hearings into illegal contributions to his party, it is no wonder that Clinton is looking to change the subject-- from the ways in which the current laws may have been violated to the need to rewrite them. Until now, the problem with passing anything that would seriously change the way bribes flow through politics is that the politicians who would have to rewrite the laws have the greatest interest in not changing them. Arizona Republican John McCain and Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold have been hollering in the wilderness for two years, trying to persuade their fellow Senators to clean up the system. They would ban the unlimited soft-money contributions that both parties depend on (more than $250 million, a historic record, last year) and reward candidates who abide by voluntary spending limits.

Their bill, which Clinton supported only sotto voce last year, died quietly on the Senate floor. But this year the bill's other co-sponsor, Tennessee's Fred Thompson, happens to be the man who will preside over the Senate hearings. So the President made sure he sided with his putative prosecutor last week. He went straight into the lion's den--to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee--to praise the bill as "tough," "balanced" and "credible." He warned that "delay will mean the death of reform," which not long ago would have sounded like wishful thinking.

There were some indications last week that the President had really come around. Clinton invited McCain and Feingold to the White House for a 45-minute strategy meeting, his first such session with members of Congress for any piece of legislation this year. He promised to "put a tremendous amount of his own time into the issue," Feingold says. And he talked seriously about how to apply pressure to the bill's Republican opponents in Congress without turning the effort into a partisan bloodbath. "We have to be very diplomatic and very clear that both sides are going to have to give," Clinton told his guests.

Perhaps more telling than anything he said was what Clinton did. He put Rahm Emanuel, who has moved into George Stephanopoulos' old office as senior political adviser, in charge of the reform campaign. Emanuel, a strategically rude, hyper sometime ballet dancer and former Israeli soldier who makes enemies first and friends later, is especially good at keeping Clinton in line. He spent much of the first four years pushing long-shot legislation to victory, including NAFTA and the crime bill; both were campaigns in which Clinton at various times turned squishy.

McCain-Feingold starts out this session as another long shot. But Feingold came away from the meeting upbeat: the President described fixing campaign finance as second only to balancing the budget. And McCain said Clinton promised to push for it "at every available forum," starting with his State of the Union address on Feb. 4.

It will take much more than a motivated President to pass McCain-Feingold. Its enemies are legion and passionate and constitute one of the most peculiar assemblies ever to conspire in Washington. As a cause, killing the bill unites the Christian Coalition with the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Right to Life Committee with the National Education Association. "We don't agree with the A.C.L.U. on very much, but we're going to work very closely on these issues," says Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the N.R.L.C..

Feingold refers to the ringleader of the resistance, Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell, as "the Grim Reaper of campaign-finance reform." But majority leader Trent Lott is the key player, and he resists reforms like free TV time for candidates and public financing of campaigns, which he calls "food stamps for politicians." Feingold insists that Lott doesn't "want to be tagged as the person who killed campaign reform. He's leaving the door open." But privately, aides to the G.O.P. leadership say it's pretty well shut.

All this leaves McCain less than optimistic. The fact that his bill got 54 votes in this past session, almost all of them Democratic, doesn't mean much. Everyone knew it wouldn't pass, so it was a free gesture. "Let's accept the premise that Congress is not going to institute a reform that changes a system that dramatically favors incumbents," says McCain. "So what would make them change would only be public opinion and pressure. Some of us believe that pressure is strong and is going to get stronger as a result of the Thompson committee hearings. The question is, 'Is that pressure going to be strong enough?'"

If the President is serious, it will not be enough for him to slip an ad for reform into his speeches. Among opponents of the bill are some of Clinton's strongest backers--and those on whom Al Gore will depend when he starts running for President the day after tomorrow. The teachers' unions, for example, contributed about $5 million last year to the Democratic cause. If Clinton is serious, he will need to persuade his allies that opposing reform is not in the nation's interests and to back off. If he is really serious, he may yield to Republican demands that labor unions, which spent $35 million in the last campaign, not be allowed to use mandatory union dues for political purposes.

Last spring, when McCain-Feingold was coming up for a vote, its opponents bombarded lawmakers with letters and faxes, including one by antiabortion activists warning that they would "score" this as a key pro-choice vote, since limits on campaign spending would restrict their ability to get a message out. Given the ever more conservative bent of the G.O.P. caucus in the Senate, that threat alone, if carried out again, would make it difficult to peel off Republican votes.

At the moment the most powerful ally of reform opponents is the Supreme Court. In Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and in more recent cases, the court essentially equated campaign money with free speech and outlawed any efforts to restrict interest groups from pouring money into "issues" advertising that helps their chosen candidates. Unless the current court is prepared to overturn Buckley, it is possible that a constitutional amendment would be needed to restrict interest groups' spending. This is the approach of House minority leader Dick Gephardt, who as a likely presidential contender in 2000 has to weigh the benefits of reform against the risks of turning off the money spigot. "What we have is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy," Gephardt argues. "You can't have both."

Of course, passing an amendment and getting it ratified by the states would take years, but Gephardt insists that reform in the short term is necessary and that his embrace of a constitutional amendment is not a diversion. Others disagree. "There's only one description of a constitutional-amendment approach--cop-out," says McCain.

McConnell says he admires Gephardt and other amendment supporters for admitting that many reform schemes are unconstitutional. "At least they're being honest," says McConnell, who voted against an amendment to ban flag burning. "I like the debate about whether we ought to amend the First Amendment for the first time in history." It's a debate he's sure his side would win.

McConnell and his allies challenge the very premise that the problem with American politics is that there is too much money in the system. "We spent less in the 1994 election than consumers spent on bubble gum that year. We're not spending too much on campaigns in this country; we're probably not spending enough." Alternative approaches to reform would remove many of the caps on contributions and require strict disclosure of who is giving what to whom. Most of the G.O.P. leadership, including Lott and John Boehner in the House, supports disclosure over spending limits.

The happy prospect for Clinton is that no matter which direction Congress takes, he is likely to come out ahead. If by some chance public pressure and collective conscience prompt lawmakers to embrace reform, Clinton will claim it as a victory for his leadership. And if once again the reform bill gets buried beneath a filibuster, Clinton will be able to blame Republicans for refusing to clean up the system. In that case, the only big loser is everyone else.

--Reported by James Carney/Washington

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON