What McCain Hath Wrought

...A presidential veto of McCain-Feingold, no matter on what grounds, would have threatened to leave Bush as a "reformer without results...

...This did not prove to be McCain's ideal turf, to put it mildly...

...Clinton's success meant that restrictions on the use of soft money were effectively over...

...When McCain campaigned in New Hampshire early last year, his theme was campaign finance reform and little else...

...Meanwhile, conservative legislators and spokesmen who have fought McCain-Feingold are unlikely to break with Bush at a time when he is perceived to be leaning their way in most other areas...

...their endgame of private negotiations on such tricky matters as the raising and inflation-indexing of campaign contribution limits...

...So: On policy, an undeniable triumph for John McCain...

...Approval of an increase to only $2,000, plus indexing, will allow incumbents to breathe a little easier, while the 84-16 margin of approval will make it difficult for the House to keep up its resistance to any raising of the limit, which in its own versions of McCain-Feingold it has never done...

...First, the increasing belief by analysts in both parties that McCain-Feingold, as amended in the Senate, is a net benefit to Republicans...

...Second, the dynamics of Bush's rivalry with John McCain...

...Unless McCain finds a way to diversify his issue mix, he risks being contained by the Bush team as this generation's John Anderson—a man of refreshing style loved by the press, but much too liberal for Republican primary voters and with too Democratic-sounding a message to establish an independent base should he decide to bolt the party...

...But even this modest hike could help some GOP congressional challengers in swing districts—which is why House minority leader Dick Gephardt was unhappy by week's end...

...What led Bush to his decision...

...Two things, one suspects...

...To simply make up for the inflation of the past three decades, the individual ceiling should have been raised from $1,000 to around $3,500...

...The other issues on which McCain has chosen to challenge Bush—patients' bill of rights, gun control, size of the tax cut—are fairly conventional components of the liberal agenda...

...When the $1,000 personal contribution limit was imposed in 1974, two things happened: the rise of Ronald Reagan, who was king of direct mail, and the switch of Republican party committees from the plutocrats of yore to a mass base of mainly small givers, which gave them massive financial superiority over the Democrats' candidate committees in the late 1970s and 1980s...

...The badly needed increase in the individual contribution limit will help challengers, but not as much as it might have...

...The major new element to emerge in recent days is the apparent decision by George W. Bush to sign pretty much whatever reform bill arrives at his desk...

...Beginning in the 1960s, the combination of direct-mail fund-raising and a more populist issue profile gave the GOP an overwhelming predominance of small givers...

...But in the closest vote of the week, Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel lost a bid to raise the limit to $3,000 and index it for future inflation...

...As soon as that decision became clear, the two sides of the debate knew for sure that they were shooting with live bullets, and began Jeffrey Bell is a principal of Capital City Partners, a Washington-based consultingfirm...

...Bush's move to neutralize his rival's signature issue leaves McCain with new stature as a legislator, but with a profound political dilemma...

...Any candidate relying on hard money could ask a contributor for no more than $1,000 in a given race, but could ask for a check for $100,000 from the same contributor for the same race, assuming the solicitor could use his party committee or another committee as a conduit...

...Campaign finance reform, disliked as it is by conservative leaders, is the one issue that generated large numbers of GOP primary voters, not to mention the big crossover vote...

...Given this huge discrepancy, it was inevitable that soft money would grow to dominate campaigns—and that the GOP advantage in a system of small givers would sooner or later disappear...

...Following his landslide victory there, the Bush and McCain campaigns decamped to South Carolina, where Bush climbed back into the lead in three main ways: He proclaimed himself a "reformer with results," mobilized social conservatives against McCain, and succeeded in throwing McCain off message...

...The Republican party is the party of hard money, not of the party leadership-generated soft money that is on its way to being banned...

...Though each of these stages has its perils, it's becoming much harder to see how a final package resembling the Senate bill gets derailed...

...Much as they dislike McCain-Feingold, they dislike John McCain even more...

...Taking soft money off the table thus poses far more risks to Democrats than Republicans, which is why Senate minority leader Thomas Daschle looked so nervous last week...

...Instead of "reform," the election became about Bob Jones University, McCain's alleged departure from the veterans' agenda, and the role of the religious Right...

...Two Democrats, Dukakis finance chairman Robert Farmer in 1988, and President Bill Clinton in 1995-96, turned the situation around by engineering the rise of soft money...

...BY JEFFREY BELL WITH THURSDAY'S DEFEAT of a killer amendment on "non-severability," the McCain-Feingold reform of federal campaign finance has gained, for the first time, an air of inevitability...

...Another affected interest group is incumbents of both parties...

...Still to come are final Senate passage (expected Monday, April 2), House action, a possible conference committee, and a signa-ture-or-veto call by President Bush...

...In politics, his move...

...Bush's decision not to fight this legislation probably dates to the most frightening moments of his nomination fight...

...Farmer was the first national fund-raiser to set up a special program for raising soft money (at the time restricted to "party-building" activities), while Clinton (at the urging of Dick Morris) raised and spent huge amounts of soft money on effective television commercials that turned the tide in the 1995 budget debate, and drove up the negative ratings of House speaker Newt Gingrich and eventual Republican nominee Bob Dole...

...It was the one thing that would have restored McCain to his most potent incarnation, the "man against the machine" who triumphed in New Hampshire...