Your great office is on the auction block. Everybody in this country above the age of seven knows this -- and knows worse about Congress. Such knowledge poisons civic faith. Only a fool can believe in a government that's for sale. Political alienation used to comport with political ignorance. No longer. Now we have informed alienation. The people know. That's why barely half of them bother to vote for President and barely a third vote for members of Congress. That's why they rank politics, along with its satellite, journalism, as the least-respected of professions. Can you have a democracy when the people don't vote and hate politics and politicians? What's at stake on this issue, Mr./Ms. President, is nothing less than the American idea.

Show us the evidence that money drives politics, opponents of reform demand. The evidence? In 1996, in eight out of ten races for the Senate and nine out of ten for the House, the candidate who spent the most money won. Give us a concrete example of money influencing government, they say. A concrete example? In a study of the 1997 balanced-budget bill, Common Cause, a citizens' lobbying organization, found that most of the tax breaks it contained went to interests that had collectively contributed $300 million to Congressional campaigns since 1995. But it is bootless asking for evidence of the weather, and money has become the weather of politics.

Banning soft money would be a major step toward restoring civic faith. But Buckley's equation of money with speech is a stumbling block. What's the point of passing reform legislation only to have the Court strike it down? Buckley must be reconsidered. You could lead that effort by asking Congress to write a new campaign-finance reform bill challenging Buckley by banning soft money. Its doctrine that money is speech has harmed democracy, something the justices could not have foreseen in 1976. Over the years the Court has allowed Congress to regulate speech -- pornography and broadcasting are two examples. In a 1949 decision, Kovacs v. Cooper, the Court upheld a limit on political speech, ruling that a sound truck advocating a candidate had to comply with noise ordinances. The First Amendment has never been absolute. Freedom of speech has been weighed against other interests. The interest in preserving the foundations of democracy, the last twenty-five years of scandal and disillusionment have taught us, massively outweighs the abstract interest in preserving money as speech.

I urge you, Mr./Ms President, to use your influence to encourage campaign-finance reform.