The Keating 535; Charles Keating did us a favor: he showed us how to clean up American campaigns.

• Author: Bates, Andrew

Andrew Bates works for the Political Hotline, a daily political wire service.

Charles Keating did us a favor: He showed us bow to clean up American campaigns.

"One of the reasons there is so much support for term limitations is that the American people are increasingly concerned about big-money influence in politics. So we must look beyond the next election to the next generation. And the time has come to put the national interest above the special interest-and to totally eliminate Political Action Committees."

Another Common Cause press release? The annual David Broder campaign reform op-ed? A stump speech by professor Paul Wellstone? No, this call for campaign reform came from President George Bush in his January 29 State of the Union address.

Thanks largely to the exploits of the Keating Five, the idea of campaign finance reform has quietly inched its way in from the fringes, claiming a plank on America's mainstream policy agenda for the first time since Watergate. And that's a damn fine thing. But as President Bush sets out to slay the PAC-men, he's making the same quick-fix mistake that turned Watergate campaign "reforms" into a nursery for folks like Charles Keating.

To understand this, all Bush had to do was take a hard look at the Keating Five scandal, which had nothing to do with PACs but everything to do with campaign finance's more subtle quid pro quo. Recognizing the broader relevance of their clients' actions, defense lawyers cynically turned the Senate Ethics Committee hearings into a sweeping indictment of 535 congressmen. It wasn't that the Keating Five "did nothing wrong" by intervening on behalf of a generous campaign donor; it was that "everybody else does it." Testifying on behalf of embattled colleague Dennis DeConcini, Senator Daniel Inouye admitted, "If [what DeConcini did] is improper, I think all of us at one time or another have done that."

As Jonathan Rowe of the Christian Science Monitor has argued, the Keating hearings presented a spectacle "worse than Watergate," since if Watergate "was about a few bad apples, the Keating Five is about the whole barrel." Still, there's been one healthy seed. By now, virtually every editorial page in the country has urged Congress to "get big money out of campaigns." And even though the only one nailed was the one not up for reelection, the Keating Five scandal has provided the impetus for reform that 20 years of Common Cause diatribes about "special interest money perverting the political process" never could.

Of course, it's easy to rant and rave that money is corrupting our political process-the most entrenched and PAC-financed congressmen do so every year. What's more difficult is to translate such apparent good intentions into meaningful reform. What we need aren't quick fixes like spending ceilings or public financing of campaigns. We need a treatment that goes to the root of today's gutter-pitched and skyscraper-priced congressional campaigns. Abolish the PACS, by all means. And then get to work at real reform.

Foley's follies

The best example of the folly of quick-fix reform comes, not surprisingly, from Congress itself, which last year turned a window of opportunity into the Potemkin Village of campaign reform.

Shamed into action by their Keating Five colleagues and prodded by a bipartisan advisory panel whose recommendations provided a reasonable blueprint for compromise, the Senate took the first wobbly step toward change. After years of filibustering or ignoring Democratic proposals, Senate Republicans realized that it would be political suicide not to back some sort of campaign reform. They emerged with a plan banning PACs and sharply restricting the flow of "soft money" generated by the political activities of unions and trade associations. The GOP proposal forced the Democrats' hand, helping produce a credible bipartisan bill that would have eliminated PAC contributions, prohibited the use of the frank for mass mailings during election years, limited out-of-state individual contributions to $250, and established voluntary, state-by-state spending limits.

It was a bill, amazingly, that addressed many of the inequities of the current system. But it didn't reach the president's desk last year. In fact, no campaign reform bill did, thanks, not to some PAC-engorged midwestern committee chair, but to Speaker of the House (and campaign reform "advocate") Tom Foley.

Unlike former Speaker Jim Wright, Foley has never been accused of any ethical wrongdoing. And unlike Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, the leading House...