Like Hillary Clinton's healthcare reform proposal, Taylor's plan seeks to reform the system by tweaking existing structures to serve a cautiously defined public good. And, like the former First Lady's plan, it will face opposition from some of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. An example came when Senator Robert Torricelli attempted to amend the McCain-Feingold bill to require that the broadcast industry, as part of its public interest obligation, provide reduced-cost advertising time to candidates and parties. The National Association of Broadcasters, which spent $11 million to derail free-airtime proposals when Taylor began to advance them in the mid-1990s, got the amendment scrapped.

Taylor gets credit from fellow reformers for taking on an industry that has profited enormously from the current campaign system--local television stations in the top seventy-five markets took in at least $771 million from the sale of 1.2 million political ads in 2000--and for pressuring for the opening of airwaves to more and better debates. But grassroots reformers and key members of the House and Senate quietly express wariness about whether the free-airtime fight is the place to make a stand. There is a good deal more enthusiasm for an initiative proposed by Fred Wertheimer, the former president of Common Cause and current president of Democracy 21. In late April, a fourteen-member task force that has been studying the Federal Election Commission is expected to release a scathing report on what Wertheimer refers to as "a captive agency." "You have today an anything goes, Wild West-show attitude about compliance with campaign finance reform," explains Wertheimer. "The laws that are on the books are not treated seriously. So if you want reform, you have to create an enforcement mechanism that works."

Wertheimer thinks the current FEC, which has been seeded with Republicans who openly oppose meaningful limits on contributions and spending, and with Democrats who frequently play the game for partisan advantage, ought to be eliminated. He would replace it with a single commissioner appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. "We have to get enforcement out from under the problem of commissioners representing each party. Right now, the parties are more interested in checking each other politically than in enforcing the law," argues Wertheimer. "We need someone who can be held accountable, someone who is expected to enforce the law, not debate it."

Feingold and McCain--and Representatives Chris Shays and Marty Meehan, who gave their names to the House version of McCain-Feingold--are talking about jointly sponsoring an FEC reform proposal along the lines Wertheimer outlines. And they are reasonably well positioned to sell a structural shift that is required for the enforcement of a law that, after all, even the President signed. But while Wertheimer, Feingold and other policy wonks can get excited about restructuring a federal agency, they admit the initiative is short on the sex appeal needed to roll the movement on. And they are hearing from grassroots campaigners that if the reform movement is to grow--by capitalizing fully upon America's Enron moment and by making reform a resonant issue in the 2002 and 2004 election cycles--it must go for the bold.

"Our community as a whole is stronger than it's been in a generation. But we cannot hold this coalition together by tinkering around the edges," says Public Campaign's Nyhart. Stephanie Wilson, executive director of the Fannie Lou Hamer Project, which works with civil rights and church organizations to broaden the base of support for campaign finance reform, says, "If this coalition does not get together and address the way we finance our campaigns, then we'll never truly engage people of color, working-class people, the great mass of Americans whose votes are the only leverage we've got against special interests. There has to be a vision that speaks to all of those who are disfranchised. Our next step has to be putting public financing back on the agenda."

For years, the reform movement shied away from pushing public financing of elections because it seemed too much to ask of a country that liked the idea of cleaning up elections but was not necessarily ready to pay for it. Decades of battering from foes of reform had made even some liberal members of Congress skeptical. But the past decade has seen dramatic movement on that front at local and state level, in most cases with help from Public Campaign. Maine and Arizona have successfully implemented "Clean Money" systems, which allow for public funding of legislative and statewide campaigns. Minnesota legislators are well along the way to expanding their state's limited public-financing program. Wisconsin and Arizona have seen significant progress toward plans to publicly finance judicial elections, and North Carolina, New Mexico, Maryland and Illinois are seen by Public Campaign's Nyhart as states where the issue is heating up. Connecticut legislators have already passed a public financing plan for statewide races, only to have it vetoed by GOP Governor John Rowland. Massachusetts voters enacted a comprehensive Clean Money public-financing law that has yet to be implemented, mainly because of roadblocks erected by House Speaker Tom Finneran (for the latest on the fight, go to www.thenation.com).

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