ASHINGTON - It sounded like a dramatic gesture. Al Gore, seizing on a suggestion from Republican Senator John S. McCain, this week promised to order the Democratic Party to stop advertising financed by unregulated ''soft money'' if George W. Bush would deliver the same message to the Republican Party.
Gore, however, left out two crucial details: His party has already spent much of its soft money, and his ban wouldn't affect union spending, where he has a big advantage over Bush. In other words, analysts said, Gore's proposal would leave him with a large financial advantage, perhaps in the tens of millions of dollars.
''At a point when Democrats have spent most of their soft money and have most of their [regulated] hard money left, Al Gore throws down the gauntlet,'' scoffed Ellen Miller, president of the nonpartisan Public Campaign, which advocates overhaul of campaign finance laws. ''It is a crass political decision.''
As a result, the Bush campaign declared the proposal dead on arrival, demonstrating once again why campaign finance deals offered in the heat of the contest are often not what they seem to be. In a year when campaign finance overhaul was a major topic of the primaries, the general election campaign is being flooded with twice as much unregulated soft money as the last election, according to the Common Cause advocacy group.
While the Gore proposal so far has gone nowhere in the presidential campaign, it does follow two similar, and similarly dramatic, moves in Senate races. Earlier this week, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Rick Lazio agreed to stop their parties from running soft money ads in their New York Senate race. Then Maria Cantwell, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Washington, unilaterally pledged to tell her party to stop soft money ads in her state, although her challenger, Republican Senator Slade Gorton, has not agreed to a ban. Cantwell's move, however, comes after she has spent $5 million of her personal fortune on the race.
But those moves in New York and Washington are minor compared with the prospect of a ban on soft money ads in the presidential campaign. The money that was designated for soft money ads in those two states is now simply being poured into other contests.
''The real question is, can any political party these days decide not to use money it has already collected?'' said Larry Makinson of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money and campaigns. ''It is inconceivable to me that they could do that. If they decide not to use it in the presidential campaign, what are they going to do, put it in a bank account until 2004?''
Moreover, such proposals are often unenforceable. In the 1996 US Senate race in Massachusetts, Senator John Kerry and then-Governor William Weld agreed to a $500,000 limit on the use of personal funds. But each campaign wound up accusing the other side of violating the agreement. Kerry won the race and there was no mechanism to penalize a breach of the cap, which was an agreement between two candidates and was not enforceable by the Federal Election Commission.
In an odd twist to the Gore proposal, the vice president made the suggestion after it was first proposed by McCain, the Arizona Republican, who earlier this year made campaign finance his top issue against Bush in the primaries. While McCain now is campaigning for Bush, the Bush campaign yesterday was livid that the senator made a proposal that seemed to work in Gore's favor. Yesterday, McCain further upset the Bush campaign by telling the Associated Press that he was sorry that Bush did not accept the challenge to stop using soft money. ''I feel it was a mistake on his part,'' McCain said of Bush.
McCain, along with Democratic Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, wrote in a Wednesday letter to the Bush and Gore campaigns that a ban on soft money would help both candidates attract new supporters.
''If you are able to reach such an agreement, we believe that voters will take note of your leadership and react favorably to your support for better, fairer elections,'' McCain and Feingold wrote.
The Bush campaign ignored McCain's authorship of the proposal, saying Bush would look forward to working with McCain ''to pass meaningful campaign finance reforms.'' The Bush campaign said that Gore was making the proposal in an effort to paper over his own ''history of disregard of campaign finance laws.''
Scott Harshbarger, president of Common Cause, said he hopes Bush calls Gore's bluff and accepts the ban on soft money. But Harshbarger said it is sad that the candidates accept the use of soft money in the first place. Harshbarger is one of several campaign finance activists who have sued the Federal Election Commission over the use soft money, arguing the campaigns are illegaly supplementing their campaign coffers by using the party's soft money on campaign-like advertisements.
Still, said Harshbarger, ''at least it is an indication of the political legs of this issue. The public cares about this issue.''
As the Bush campaign sees it, Gore is mainly hoping to give himself an issue to exploit in Tuesday's presidential debate in Boston.
Bush, in a proposal that has been sharply criticized by McCain, has proposed banning corporate and labor soft money but would continue to allow individual contributions. As a result, there would be nothing to stop the flood of individual donations from corporate and labor chieftains and others that often exceed $100,000.
''That's a rather large loophole,'' Makinson said.
