After years of stalling, the Senate finally begins debate Monday on the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. The central feature of this important legislation is its ban on “soft money” contributions to political parties, the unregulated and unrestricted contributions that totaled nearly $488 million in the last election.

The central feature of the debate may, sadly, be political advantage masquerading as public interest. From the moment Democrats gained enough seats seats to break the Republican led filibuster (in which Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins rightly refused to participate) and to move this issue from talk-show theorizing to Capitol Hill reality, the two parties have been brought closer together by their mutual interest in protecting incumbents.

Some Democratic senators, such as John Breaux of Louisiana and Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, who were gung-ho reformers when reform didn’t have a chance, now are having second thoughts, worrying aloud that McCain-Feingold would leave unaddressed too many other avenues for fund-raising abuse. The real worry is that the bill would close the one avenue Democrats have gotten pretty good at traveling – after trailing Republicans for years, they pulled nearly even in soft-money chase 2000, raking in $243 million to the GOP’s $244.4 million.

Republican leaders, those implacable foes of reform, Sens. Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell, are finding the pleasure of watching sanctimonious Democrats squirm blunted by the realization that the public is increasingly cynical about a system in which wealthy contributors set the agenda. Rather than simply being opposed to reform, they must embrace something, and that something is the truly bad bill offered by Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a package of non-reforms that keeps the soft money coming but limits individual contributions to a paltry $60,000 per year and increases the regulated “hard money” limit from $1,000 to $3,000, thus tripling the agenda-setting ability of the wealthy and adding to the GOP’s overwhelming advantage in this category (their $2 billion in 2000 was four times what Democrats raised). Factor in the practice of “bundling,” and the clout of wealthy families and like-minded executives increases geometrically.

President Bush, as promised in his campaign, is offering up his own reform proposal, a sort of Hagel-lite. It eliminates soft money from unions and corporations but allows it from individuals, creating a loophole unions and corporations can join hands and walk through together. It increases the hard money limit and includes this nifty poison pill – advance approval for the use of any portion of union dues for political purposes must by obtained from individual union members. The “uniter” sees no need to place a similar requirement upon corporations that use shareholders’ money.

Two weeks have been set aside for the long-overdue McCain-Feingold debate. Dozens of amendments have been offered, from minor adjustments to wholesale gutting, with a new amendment to be brought up every three hours. This unusual arrangement gives the public the opportunity to watch ideas either gradually evolve into good legislation or to be corrupted by self-interest and special interests. It’s showtime for the Senate, and it’s about time.