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What did he say about McCain-Feingold?

I'll try to summarize his lengthy answer as best I can.

Basically, he said most of us agree there must be *some* limits on campaign contributions to candidates ("even Barry Goldwater was for that"). But, the traditional $1000 per person per candidate was too low; it favored incumbents because it made it very hard for a challenger to get any traction.

Meanwhile, soft contributions were just a back door way of corrupting the system. So, he used McCain-Feingold to increase the per-person contribution limit while at the same time fixing much of what was wrong with soft money.

He also said in retrospect, the limits on advertising were the wrong thing to do and should not have been in the bill.

I'm sure I didn't do justice to his reasoning. LinnKeyes2000 was there, too; hopefully, he'll see this and can do better.

A retiring Congressman does not usually endorse until the writing is clear on the wall and the nomination is in hand. Then he endorses and hopes for a job offer if the nominee wins.

yeah hi, I'd add to that he thought, "the politicians weren't looking at the $1000 donations anymore because they could get all this (soft money) over here". He wanted to do something to put the focus back on the individual's contribution. He said it was his amendment that caused the change from $1000 to $2000 indexed to inflation.

I still don't like other aspects of mclame-feingold. I at least understood his logic. Had I been on stage, I would have added to his statement that if he's successful as president and gets a proper federalism back in place, then mclame-feingold will be irrelevant. With power dispersed amongst the state and local level that would force too much dilution of lobby money for lobbyists to have much effect.