Saint John.

• Author: Noah, Timothy
• Position: Political Booknotes

CITIZEN MCCAIN: Maverick Politician by Elizabeth Drew Simon & Schuster, $23.00

THE RECENT ENACTMENT OF the first major overhaul of campaign-finance law since 1974 ought to provide great material for a book, and Elizabeth Drew ought to be the ideal journalist to write it. Two decades ago, in her book Politics and Money: The New Road to Corruption, Drew was one of the first reporters to point out the soft-money loophole allowing corporations and wealthy individuals to donate unrestricted amounts to political parties. The flow of soft money was undermining the post-Watergate limits on campaign giving, but at the time, very few people had even heard the term "soft money." Although jeremiads about the need for additional campaign-finance reform were plentiful, they nearly always focused on the need to rein in political action committees, a problem that would soon be dwarfed by the soft-money deluge. Political parties were not even required by law to make public the information about who gave softmoney and how much they gave, and as a consequence they didn't. Politics and Money helped to change all that.

Unfortunately, Citizen McCain is no Politics and Money. Rather than focus on the nuts and bolts of the new campaign-finance law (which bans soft-money contributions to national parties), on the clash of interests and ideologies

that shaped it, and on the possible benefits or difficulties it will create, Drew relates the narrative of John McCain's labors to get the bill through Congress. That's a real disappointment. Drew's expertise on campaign-finance law and how it has been subverted in the past would be of great use in sorting through the arguments, pro and con, about how much use the new law will be. Is the soft-money ban likely to pass muster in the courts? Will it weaken the political parties? How quickly should we expect clever lawyers to find ways to get around the new restrictions? I incline toward the view that campaign-finance laws merely slow the flow of money until new loopholes are found, yet that this is in itself valuable. Like McCain, I'm not dispirited by the notion that Congress will have to revisit the issue every few years. (To complain that any given campaign-finance reform is impermanent is like saying, "Why vacuum the carpet when it's just going to get dirty again?") But maybe I'm wrong. I haven't done much reporting on the subject and I haven't engaged the various arguments as fully as I ought. A book that did this for me...