Campaign Hearings Should Avoid Partisan Detours

Successfully guiding the Senate’s investigation into campaign fund-raising excesses will take all the wiles and experience Fred Thompson has gained over the years as a Watergate Committee aide, an actor and now a respected member of the upper chamber.

The Tennessee Republican says he wants to present an interesting story that will capture the public’s attention (the hearings will be telecast in full on C-SPAN beginning at 7 a.m. California time today). The hope is to arouse public anger about campaign fund-raising abuses that will motivate Congress to adopt needed reform--reform of the sort that has routinely been ignored by federal legislators.

The primary purpose of these hearings is to determine what went wrong and then draft a plan to fix the 1974 law enacted in the wake of the Watergate hearings. Insiders say that testimony is likely to produce no bombshells.

Still, Thompson will be under pressure from some in his own party to try to embarrass the Clinton White House and to make it appear that only Democrats abuse federal fund-raising laws. But if the hearings assume the aura of a partisan witch hunt, the committee will lose credibility and its goal of campaign law reform will be undermined.

We know enough from prospective evidence divulged so far that the White House has plenty to be embarrassed about. What we really need to know, however, is if foreign funds were spirited into the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996 in violation of the law. If so, how was that done, and with what intent? Was there some quid pro quo? What excesses did Republicans commit, if any? And finally, how do we correct the legal shortcomings?

This is not Watergate. But Thompson’s experience at the side of Sam Irvin and Howard Baker nearly a quarter-century ago will serve him well now. Thompson knows, as they did, that the most important task of the chairman of a Senate investigation is to maintain the integrity of the process.