Unless you were raised by wolves – or politicians – you probably learned as a child at your mother’s knee the principle of housekeeping entropy. Dirt gets dirtier the longer it sits.

Yesterday’s socks, for example, not only will not pick themselves off the floor and march to the laundry hamper – they will, in time, become stuck to the floor. Dishes piled in the sink eventually reach a state in which hot, soapy water will have to be augmented by chisel and blowtorch. If left to their own devices, dust bunnies under the bed will multiply like … well, you get the picture.

Politics is like that. Scrub the system with all your might, but leave just the tiniest crumb of crud, the merest smudge of muck, and it will grow into a great, hulking slime monster. If we’re not careful, Maine’s Clean Election Act will become like that.

When voters passed this law by referendum in 1996, Maine was the toast of Political Observer Town. From the New York Times to USA Today to the Cleveland Plain Dealer (the coolest-named newspaper ever) to the Ventura (Calif.) County Star, editorial writers and columnists sang the praises of the brave little state that dared tell Big Money to stuff it. TV pundits, usually a demure bunch, fairly gushed. NPR did cartwheels. The architects of the successful campaign were feted by the very best activists Hollywood had to offer.

The celebration continued after the 2000 election, Maine’s first test of its publicly funded campaign mechanism. Hardly a newspaper anywhere failed to opine that if Maine could elect leaders based upon ideas instead of bank accounts, so could their state. This time, it was David Broder’s turn to gush. Charles Osgood’s bow tie spun with delight.

To a considerable degree, the singing, gushing and spinning were warranted. Fully one-third of 2000’s candidates, incumbents and challengers, eschewed the dirty work of raising private funds and ran Clean. There was an uptick, small but significant, in the number of candidates for the Legislature and in contested primaries. Spending per campaign was reduced markedly, indicating that more time was being spent discussing issues, less spent lusting after money. The spending gap between winners and losers closed dramatically. Perhaps most importantly, victorious Cleans all said they were taking office without being beholden to anyone but their constituents.

There was a crumb left unswept, a smudge unwiped. Two legislative leaders – Democrat Michael Saxl and Republican Rick Bennett – both ran Clean. The time they saved not private begging money for their own campaigns was spent, however, begging it for their leadership PACs, political action committees that give money to privately funded candidates so they, upon taking office, would be beholden to the leaders who got them there.

This raised the question of whether running Clean is a statement of principle or merely a convenience, of whether a candidate should feed at the public trough for one purpose and the private for another. The state ethics commission considered the matter and determined, correctly, that it simply was not addressed in the law. This sloshing of public and private money made a tiny little mess the Legislature would have to mop up.

The Legislature carefully stepped around the little mess and now it’s grown into a big one. The Clean Election Law had its second test last week in a special election in Portland to fill a vacant Senate seat and it was hello, Slimezilla.

There were five candidates. Three ran Clean – Democrat Michael Brennan, Republican Sally Vamvakias, independent Philip Dawson. All three started out with the 17,500 public dollars the law deems adequate to run an effective campaign for the Maine Senate.

Not effective enough for the Maine Democratic Party, which went out and spent in excess of 35,000 private dollars on Mr. Brennan’s behalf. According to the law’s provision regarding independent expenditures (money spent for a candidate by folks outside the official campaign), this entitled Mrs. Vamvakias and Mr. Dawson to 35,000 more public dollars. The final tab? More than $122,000 in taxpayer money was spent on one lousy seat in the Senate for a session that will be over in a few weeks. With 7,000 or so votes cast, that’s $15 and change per vote. When Mr. Dawson, who was being kind when he called the whole unclean thing “obscene,” returns the money he got but refused to spend, the per-vote cost will drop to still-off-color $12.

A prominent Republican PAC, Maine Unlimited, spent more than $10,000 on Mrs. Vamvakias’ behalf. This amount was below the independent expenditure threshold that triggers matching public funds. Given Maine Unlimited’s record of bankrolling some of the most misleading negative ads ever seen, this is a miracle of good judgment.

The Clean Election Fund gets $2 million every year from the state’s General Fund, and the proceeds, about $265,000 a year, from the $3 income-tax check-off. The question of why some 330,000 Mainers voted for the Clean Election Act in ’96 but only some 88,000 kick in the three bucks to fund it must wait for another day. The question now – especially relevant with the election of 181 legislators just eight months away – is what Maine taxpayers get for their money.

Last week, from the Brennan side, they got a lot of phone calls urging votes for their man. That’s smart, considering the extent to which the telemarketed public has become hypersensitive to unsolicited phone calls, The Vamvakias camp produced an ad scolding Mr. Brennan for voting himself a pay raise as a member of the House. Had that campaign not been constrained by its tight budget of $52,500 in public money, plus more than $10,000 private, it might have been able to squeeze in mention that their candidate was on the commission that unanimously backed an increase in legislative pay and that the state Constitution expressly prohibits legislators from voting themselves pay raises. We have a system to better fund campaigns. When do we get better campaigns?

In surveying the national media reaction to Maine’s Clean Election Act, I came upon a transcript of CBS Radio’s Osgood File, aired after the 2000 election that set the esteemed commentator’s haberdashery a-twirling. He begins with the observation that people sometimes think politics is all about money. He cuts to a quick quote from successful Clean candidate Sen. Beth Edmonds, who says it’s not. He promises the full story on how Maine found the answer to campaign finance reform “after these words from the name-your-own-price maven, priceline-dot-com.” I wonder what my mother uses on things stained with irony.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.