ANOTHER GREAT DEMOCRATIC VICTORY:

'McCain-Feingold School' Finds Many Bewildered (ADAM NAGOURNEY, 2/19/03, NY Times)

Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican Party lawyer who has conducted seminars for the other side of the aisle, said lawmakers were startled to hear that once-standard practices like acting as host at a fund-raiser for a home-state governor might now be illegal. "There's an initial stage where the reaction is, 'This can't be true,' " Mr. Ginsberg said. "And then there's the actual anger stage."

The chief provision of McCain-Feingold was a ban on the national parties' raising of soft money, the large, little-regulated contributions that were supposed to encourage general party-building activities but as a practical matter had become the chief method of raising millions from the wealthy during the campaign season.

Most of the party lawyers and fund-raising officials now explaining the new law were never fans of it to begin with. Adjusting to the measure's detailed workings, however, has proved bewildering and anxiety-producing even among those who supported it. As members of Congress begin refilling their coffers for 2004, the law's full effect is just beginning to sink in.

The law, being challenged as unconstitutional by dozens of groups spanning the political spectrum, has already had sobering financial consequences for the Democrats, who, it is becoming clear, have been put at a decided fund-raising disadvantage by a measure that many of them championed.

With federal candidates and national party committees now barred from raising soft money, they have been forced to finance their activities from the contributions of hard-money donors, who are limited to $2,000 per candidate in any one election.

Soft-money contributions were previously the main source of financing for the national Democratic Party, which roughly kept pace with the Republicans in collecting them. By contrast, Republicans last year raised nearly twice as much hard money as the Democrats, evidence of a much broader base of contributors that Democrats believe has put the Republicans in a dominant fund-raising position as the 2004 presidential and Congressional races approach. While campaign experts had predicted that the Republicans would have an advantage, the gap has been even wider than expected.

The law is, of course, unconstitutional and we'd support the impeachment of George W. Bush for signing it, but you can see why it was so hard to resist politically. The Democrats will have very little money with which to spread their incoherent messages in the coming elections, increasing the already great likelihood that 2004 will be a watershed. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 19, 2003 9:24 PM