JAY NIXON EMBRACES QUESTIONABLE FUNDING TACTIC

The president of the United States was in St. Louis this week raising funds for the 1998 U.S. Senate campaign of Attorney General Jay Nixon. He and Nixon attended a $1,000-per-person reception and a $5,000-per-couple dinner that followed. The events are said to have netted more than $200,000 for Nixon's campaign against Sen. Christopher Bond and a similarly huge amount for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Involved here is a dubious concept known in the political trade as tallying. Contributions to federal candidates such as Nixon and Bond are limited by law to $1,000 per person in the primary and $1,000 per person in the general elections. The same limits don't apply to federal committees such as the DSCC that also benefited from the Clinton-Nixon event. Thus campaign officials attribute to Nixon's campaign the maximum figures individual donors can give, and the rest goes to the DSCC, a national campaign committee. Some weight is given, we are told, to the amount raised at such events when allocating where expenditures of this money will be made in next year's campaign. This is tallying.

For his part Bond has sworn off tallying, pledging not to engage in it. Nixon obviously hasn't, citing a Federal Elections Commission ruling that says it is OK. While this may be true, this doesn't make it seemly.

All this leads inevitably to calls for reform from the usual quarters -- liberal media types, mostly. What they're really talking about is rationing and regulating speech, the very currency of debate in a free society. Far better than this would be to lift or abolish the $1,000 limit and require candidates to publish their donations within 48 hours of receipt on the Internet. Candidates wouldn't have to spend such huge amounts of time begging for $1,000 checks, and might just be able to visit with ordinary voters for a change.