The Maine Chance.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

All the talk about reform is over, and the Presidential campaign is on, brought to you by the professionals from Wall Street and Big Oil. Beltway cynics smugly repeat the conventional wisdom: Campaign finance reform is dead on arrival; voters just don't care about it. What better illustration than the two corporate Presidential nominees: George W. Bush, now running as the "real reformer," and fundraising marathoner Al Gore, who scampers back and forth between unions and the chamber of commerce, dodging questions on global trade like a dithering squirrel.

But if money talks louder than ever in national politics, at the grassroots level, there's a quiet revolution going on. Voters in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Arizona are making radical changes in campaign finance laws, defying the conventional wisdom, and opening their wallets to pay for publicly funded campaigns.

After ten years of organizing, politicking, and a lengthy court battle, Maine's "clean-elections" system is up and running. A three-year legal challenge on free speech grounds by the National Right to Life Committee and the ACLU just failed, and 115 candidates for state office will take advantage of full public financing this fall.

On a recent Sunday afternoon in Portland, a small band of reformers celebrated at the home of Alison Smith of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections. Smith passed around a souvenir bar of soap and read a congratulatory letter from Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin. The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill has languished in Congress since 1995, Feingold pointed out in his letter. Even so, "In that same period of time, you gathered over 65,000 signatures in one day to put the Clean Election initiative on the ballot ... and put the system in place for the 2000 elections. What you have accomplished is truly inspiring and humbling."

The activists were in an upbeat mood. "After so many years, to have people using it, having the system work, it's just gratifying," said John Brautigam, executive director of the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund. The Maine law has given rise to a whole new crop of candidates who aren't wealthy or don't have friends and associates they can tap for big contributions. And, though it's a voluntary system, it also has real teeth: If a candidate refuses to play the game, his clean-money opponent automatically receives twice as much public funding--up to $10,000 for a house race and $40,000 for the state...