Bradley, McCain Take On Reform, and Front-Runners

Insurgent presidential candidates Bill Bradley and Sen. John McCain crossed party lines Thursday to snipe at each other’s rivals and plead for an end to unregulated big-money political contributions.

For their announcement, they met at a symbolic site: a limestone marker where the promise of campaign finance reform once fluttered briefly.

Bradley, the Democrat and former New Jersey senator, and McCain, the Arizona Republican, bent over a worn wooden table on a hilltop outside this New Hampshire mill town, signing a terse pledge to push for reforms of campaign spending and to “not allow our political parties to spend soft money” if they become nominees.

Despite the liberal bent of Bradley’s campaign and McCain’s conservative cast, both men have targeted the growing use of “soft money” as a critical campaign issue. Soft money refers to unregulated donations used by corporations and special-interest groups to pour millions of dollars into political party coffers for general purposes--money which is then funneled into candidates’ campaigns.

“This pernicious impact of soft money has hurt my party,” McCain said.

Bradley agreed, saying its use is a corrupting influence, “a plague on both our houses.”

The amounts raised can be significant. A Common Cause analysis, for example, found that, during the first 15 months of the 1997-98 election cycle, the GOP raised $55.7 million in soft money, with the Democrats taking in $34.3 million.

As they joined in their unprecedented political union, Bradley and McCain displayed no reticence to attacking their own presidential rivals and even took turns flaying at the other man’s primary foe.

McCain Ridicules Gore Response

McCain belittled Democrat Al Gore for his appearance at a fund-raising event at the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights, Calif., in April 1996 and mocked the vice president’s infamous recitation later in the year that he had “no controlling legal authority” to halt alleged fund-raising abuses that originated in the White House.

“The vice president of the United States asked monks and nuns to pay thousands of dollars to violate their vows of poverty so they could spiritually commune with him,” McCain said. “If I’m elected president, I will be the controlling legal authority.”

Bradley returned the favor, lacerating Republican George W. Bush for erecting the most formidable campaign fund-raising organization in modern political history. The Texas governor has already netted $63 million, a figure that does not include soft money.

But, Bradley said, Bush’s fund-raisers “are setting up committees across this country, soft money conduits. . . . Do you want a change where politics is based on ideals and ideas, or do you want to have soft money continue to play a dominant role in politics?”

Until the Bradley-McCain “summit of the underdogs” was announced last week, Gore and Bush had said little about campaign finance reform. The front-runners have declined to make any pledges, saying they would not unilaterally agree to ban soft money without mutual disarmament on all sides.

Bush, Gore Shy From Disarming

Each has his reasons. Gore is clearly sensitive to charges that soft money contributed to his involvement in some of the 1996 fund-raising episodes exploited by Republicans in Congress.

Chris Lehane, spokesman for Gore, acknowledged the politically damaging position the vice president found himself in when Gore defended making fund-raising telephone calls from the White House in 1996. Gore said it was legal under the broad, permissive rules that govern the use of soft money.

Bush, meanwhile, said a pledge would disarm Republicans by cutting off a source of corporate donations without preventing Democrats from culling millions from unions. Another Common Cause study found that in the 1998 campaigns for the House and Senate, labor unions contributed $38.4 million to candidates and parties.

In a prepared statement, Bush said McCain’s insistence on banning soft money is flawed because it fails to stop unions from donating hundreds of thousands of dollars in dues--even without approval from individual union members.

“Any plan to reduce the influence of special-interest money in politics must be fair--and no plan should benefit one political party over another,” Bush said. “I support a ban on unlimited ‘soft money’ contributions from corporations and labor unions--but the proposal by Sens. McCain and Bradley has a huge loophole that benefits the Democrats and would hurt the Republican Party and our conservative principles.”

Bradley and McCain have agreed to ban soft money if they run against each other next year, but warn they would troll for any funding source if they win the nomination and face off against an opponent who refuses to take their mutual pledge.

Gore moved Thursday to stake out his own high ground on campaign finance reform. In a full-page advertisement in the local Claremont Eagle Times, he pledged that “if I am the Democratic nominee, I will ban soft money, providing the Republican nominee also agrees.”

Gore said he had taken that position 2 1/2 years ago. But Bradley noted caustically Thursday that when he proposed a soft money ban this year, his call was spurned by Gore’s campaign chairman, former Rep. Tony Coelho.

“I’m glad that he’s finally come over,” Bradley said, grinning slightly.

Lehane insisted that Bradley was a recent convert to campaign finance reform and failed to sponsor any related legislation until after he announced in 1995 that he was quitting the Senate. Bradley’s spokesman, Eric Hauser, countered that Bradley had been a sponsor, along with Democratic Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, of a campaign reform bill that dated to 1993.

At their meeting, neither Bradley nor McCain mentioned a gathering at this same site that briefly raised hopes for campaign finance reform.

An inscription on the stone bench behind the two presidential underdogs was mute testimony to the obstacles their cause faces: “Site of historic summit between President William Jefferson Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.”

Clinton and Gingrich met and shook hands here in June 1995. But their vow to reform political fund-raising was soon submerged amid the intraparty warfare that raged in Washington.

The symbolic summit between Bradley and McCain was preceded by an hourlong town hall meeting between the two men and New Hampshire residents that was televised by ABC’s “Nightline.”

After the town hall, the two men exchanged copies of their campaign autobiographies.

“To Bill, with admiration and appreciation,” McCain wrote on an inside page of “Faith of My Fathers.” And at the front of “Values of the Game,” Bradley scribbled: “To John McCain, with respect for your life and your commitment to campaign finance reform.”

*

Times staff writer Janet Wilson contributed to this story.