Because it is an election year and our country has focused on many other issues, the cause of campaign finance reform has taken a back seat in our national debates.

But I am confident that it will soon be back on the "front burner." One reason is that the current campaigns demonstrate that we need REAL reform now more than ever. Both parties in the presidential and Congressional races are breaking all records in the mad dash to collect buckets full of unregulated soft money.

And the Democratic and Republican parties are eagerly eyeing new ways to get around campaign finance laws in the looming Congressional races.

It was with this continuing money chase in the background, that a bipartisan group of us who are dedicated to campaign finance reform met a few days ago. U.S. Sen. John McCain, long a major national leader in this fight, summoned me and a small group of other reform leaders from both the House and the Senate to a meeting to plot the future course of our effort.

Among those present were U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, U.S. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and his brother Congressman Sander Levin, both Michigan Democrats, U.S. Rep. Marty Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Republicans Chris Shays of Connecticut, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, Sen. McCain and me.

We realize that given the fact that this an election year, there is little chance of dealing with the most pressing problem - soft money - this year. Soft money is unregulated contributions from individuals, corporations or unions to political parties and other groups that are not covered by limits on donations to the campaigns of individual candidates. But after the November elections we will have a new presidential administration and a new Congress. With the next presidential election four years off and House elections two years away, we will have a tremendous opportunity to ACT on real reform and on ENDING the soft money chase.

Several other factors will be on the side of reform. First, even some of the interest groups that are being asked to contribute huge amounts of soft money are getting tired of this unseemly legal "shakedown" from both political parties. Secondly, neither party now has a clear advantage in soft money raising, but both are polluted by the continuing need to raise and spend large amounts of soft money to remain competitive. Frankly, at one point folks in my party were unwilling to give up soft money because Republicans were able to raise much more of it than the other party. Since that is no longer true, I strongly believe that many more of my Republican colleagues will be willing to end this obscene soft money ?arms race.? This is especially true if eliminating soft money is tied to a gradual increase in individual contribution limits, which have not been adjusted since 1974.

And all sides - Republican, Democrat and independent - can remember the

soft money fund raising debacle in the 1996 presidential race. Regardless of which side of the political fence one is on, it's clear that the controversy has caused - and continues to cause - the Clinton-Gore Administration unending political and legal headaches.

As far as I am concerned these headaches were self-inflicted. Tennessee's senior Senator, Fred Thompson, recently delivered a speech on what happened in 1996. Sen. Thompson is chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that investigated the 1996 fundraising scandals. What he said is perhaps the best summary I have heard of how badly things went wrong in the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign fund-raising effort.

Sen. Thompson recounted the story of how Clinton-Gore, despite having signed pledges not to accept outside money in exchange for getting federal financing for their campaign, allowed millions of dollars to be funneled from foreign sources, including China, through the Democratic National Committee to benefit the Clinton-Gore campaign.

Then the Administration allowed the top leadership of its Justice Department to hinder and thwart the resulting investigation when it moved toward officials at the top of the Clinton-Gore Administration.

Thompson quoted from a July 16, 1998, memo from Charles LaBella, the respected career prosecutor who headed the campaign finance probe before leaving the Justice Department in frustration. The LaBella memo to Attorney General Janet Reno said that there was reason to believe that Clinton and Gore "knew or had reason to know that foreign funds were being funneled into the DNC and the reelection effort." LaBella added: "If these allegations involved anyone other than the President, Vice President, senior White House or DNC and Clinton/Gore 96 officials, an appropriate investigation would have commenced months ago without hesitation."

This sad and disgusting tale, so much the result of the poison and sickness of soft money in our elections, explains more than anything else why those of us who want reform must re-double our effort to make sure that real reform happens.

The two major political parties are shamelessly thumbing their noses at the American people when it comes to clean campaigns and elections. That is why our bipartisan group of reformers - with the grassroots help of the American people - must persevere until we succeed at the real campaign finance reform.