In state after state, notes Nyhart, the public and the courts have proven more amenable to public financing than the politicians. That, he suggests, is a signal that taxpayers are getting the message that special-interest-funded electioneering costs them more--in the form of corporate welfare and skewed tax policy--than paying for campaigns out of the general fund. Like a lot of other activists across the country, Nyhart is enthusiastic about "connect the dots" campaigns that explain the parallels between the votes of legislators and campaign contributions. "There needs to be more pressure on candidates about where they get their money from and how they vote as a result," he says.

Already, national environmental organizations and advocacy groups such as the Peace Action Education Fund are publishing reviews of Congressional voting on key issues that note the money accepted by members from interested corporations and political action committees. And Feingold has begun "calling the bankroll" in the Senate, reading into the Congressional Record details of special-interest giving on issues facing Congress.

Stephanie Wilson likes it when Feingold calls the bankroll, and she loves it when the Senator refers to the current system as "legalized bribery." But she wants to add another word to the reform movement's lexicon. "When you say 'campaign finance reform' to most working Americans, it means nothing. When you say 'Clean Money/Clean Elections' to poor people, even that means nothing," she explains. "When you say 'equality,' that gets them going, that gets them motivated. We have to connect campaign finance reform to civil rights, to voting rights, to fundamental issues."

Wilson wants the reform movement to apply what her group calls the Fannie Lou Hamer standard, which recalls the Mississippi civil rights leader who challenged the national Democratic Party to get serious about fighting segregation. Under the standard, the measure of whether a reform is real is determined by the answer to a single question: "How far does this reform really go in making the system fair for someone like Fannie Lou Hamer--a passionate leader, a woman, a person of color, a person of little means?" By that measure, Wilson argues, public financing is the reform that makes the grade. And she is not alone. "The most effective reform--public financing--has been off the table for the past few years," says Nyhart. "Now that McCain-Feingold has passed, there is a growing sense that if we want this movement to progress, we have to put it back on the table."

Many in the movement want to start by addressing abuses of the current system for providing public financing for presidential candidates in time for the 2004 election. That makes sense to Feingold, but he wants to see those changes come as part of a fuller program. "It would be a mistake to do something tepid or mild as the next step," the Senator says. "I think we have to make the leap and say that we need public financing. We have to be able to say that if we win, average people--not just the rich, not just the connected--will have a chance to run for office in this country."

If that turns out to be the next message of the movement, argues Stephanie Wilson, "Get out of our way, because finally we'll have a movement that can tell people: 'We are done tinkering. We are done offering you a little democracy. We're getting real about reform.'"

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