Bring On The Cash!

ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY ROBERT NEUBECKER
RAKING IT IN: President Bush has raised $132 million this cycle, while Democrat John Kerry stands at $25 million

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And the Republicans are not above applying their superior resources to someone else's idea. MoveOn.org , the liberal group that began as a protest movement against the Clinton impeachment and has turned into the lodestar of Bush-bashing efforts by Democratic activists, provides the Republicans with a model they are sure to emulate: a nonprofit organization that raises millions and airs what are essentially political ads without having to live by the restrictions that hamper traditional campaigns. MoveOn has spent more than $1 million on ads in Ohio alone already this year, including one called "Polygraph," in which President Bush says that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons program while a lie-detector machine shows the graphs spiking.

All this may sound like nothing has changed since the McCain-Feingold law. But John McCain, the Republican Senator whose name is synonymous with campaign-finance reform, insists that the effort was never about getting money out of politics just giving it less power. "We don't see the movement of money that we saw before," McCain says, "because an elected official can't pick up the phone anymore and ask a trial lawyer or a union leader or a CEO for a check for six figures and then mention, 'By the way, your legislation will be coming before Congress next week.'"

And even with the new law in effect, Howard Dean proved a candidate could reinvent the rules of fund raising. He not only managed to nearly double Clinton's fund-raising record in a pre-election year, but he did it on an average contribution of $61, bringing tens of thousands of new contributors into the process. Kerry finance chief Lou Susman says tapping into that pool of donors will be a major part of his strategy, although it could be a challenge the longer Dean stays in the race blasting Kerry as just another Washington insider.

Supporters of the law insist it has been a success, retooling the engine of campaign finance from huge soft-money donations delivered to the parties to small hard-money donations delivered to the candidates. McCain hopes the FEC will put the 527s out of the game, but even it it doesn't, he says, "they don't give the same bang for the buck." Maybe so, but many of Washington's finest attorneys are trying to find a way to keep the almighty dollar as almighty as ever. And more often than not, the lawyers win.