(Photo Illustration by William Duke)

Thus did the authors of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 believe they could not only curb the amount of money coursing through the political system but also free up the candidates to spend more time talking issues with voters.

It worked for a while. As recently as 1992, Bill Clinton was able to secure the Democratic nomination with less than $15 million.

But today, experts say, candidates will need $20 million just to play, $26 million to be considered top tier and, in the case of Al Gore, $55 million if you plan on raising and spending every penny permitted under the FEC's complex set of rules and regulations.

And while the cost of a presidential primary has steadily risen, the $1,000 legal maximum per donor has remained the same. As a result, a candidate who might have gotten by with courting 10,000 individual donors in 1976 is now looking at rounding up three or four times as many.

Some no longer even bother. In recent campaigns, wealthy contestants like Ross Perot and Steve Forbes have tossed out the rule book and the matching funds that come with it and spent their own millions with no restrictions. And this year, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, fearing Forbes will again use his wealth to carpet-bomb fellow Republicans, is considering forgoing matching funds in order to bust the spending limits in the early primaries (though he'll still have to abide by the $1,000-a-head limit on contributions).

Gore, partly for image reasons and partly because he would like to collect up to $16 million in matching funds next year, has decided to play within the system. But he is stretching the rules as far as he can. Here's how he plans to get to $55 million:

• Each election cycle the FEC sets a new, inflation-adjusted spending cap for the primaries. This is the big account that pays for polls and television commercials and plane tickets and marching bands and pizza for the volunteers. In 1996, the cap (including matching funds) was $30.9 million; this time around, FEC officials estimate that it will hit $33.5 million.

• Because it costs money to raise money, the FEC allows campaigns to collect an additional 20 percent for "fund-raising expenses." This account is supposed to pay for the telephone calls, letters and dinners used to extract money from donors. In the past, creative campaigns have found ways to squeeze in other items such as polls or salaries for political aides with little or no fund-raising experience.

Figure on $6.7 million for this account, for a running total of $40.2 million.

• A decade after the current campaign finance laws were written, politicians in both parties convinced the FEC that the cost of making sure all those individual checks are legal should not come out of either the political budget or the fund-raising budget. So there is a third pool of money, known as the legal and accounting fund, that pays the salaries of the small army of lawyers and accountants who are supposed to make sure the candidate follows the rules.

Throw in another $6.7 million, which brings the tally to $46.9 million.

• Finally, for the candidate confident enough to believe that he or she will win nomination, yet fearful about breaking some of the rules along the way, there's one more account: the General Election Legal and Accounting Compliance fund, or GELAC ("gee-lack"). This money can't be used until the general election, and its main purpose is to pay fines and penalties if any rules are violated. But it can be collected now and used as a revolving loan fund for the campaign for times when the incoming cash flow slows down.

The Clinton team forgot about GELAC until late in 1996 – right around the time Republicans and the media began questioning the Democrats' fund-raising practices. At that point, McAuliffe and company had to scramble to rustle up $7.9 million-plus for the account. Gore, more cautious and better organized, is already on top of the situation. He opened his GELAC account on New Year's Day, the very same day he officially began his campaign.

The goal is to squirrel away $8 million for this fund.

Which all adds up to $54.9 million.

And that's just the beginning. Once the primaries are over, the two nominees will receive $67 million apiece in federal funds for the general election. And if the past is any guide, they will heavily supplement this bounty by turning their fund-raising operations toward "soft money," the unlimited, loosely regulated donations theoretically earmarked for "party building" activities (get-out-the-vote drives, issue-oriented ads, etc.) that have increasingly been spent, with a wink and a nudge, to get the parties' candidates elected.

But the scramble for soft money won't begin in earnest until 2000. For the rest of this year, the competition that will consume contenders in both parties will be the vacuuming up of tens of thousands of individual "hard money" donations. It's a competition Al Gore has been preparing for for the last decade.

Training Camp

But shortly thereafter, according to Maryland developer Nathan Landow, the senator began to reconsider. Money was the key.

Landow, who has since achieved notoriety for allegedly pressuring Kathleen Willey not to go public with accusations that she was harassed by President Clinton, describes bumping into Gore at a Capitol Hill party and encouraging him to run. As one of Walter Mondale's key fund-raisers with a network left over from the 1984 campaign, Landow said he could provide crucial seed money.

A few days later, Gore invited Landow to lunch at his parents' Capitol Hill apartment, where over soggy chicken salad sandwiches in a dining room laden with political memorabilia and tasteful antiques, the young senator quizzed the experienced fund-raiser on the financial ins and outs of running for president. The first step, Landow told Gore, was to convene a meeting of the uncommitted money men from Mondale. "I'll lean on them to be here," Landow recalls telling Gore, "but you have to close the deal."

After two meetings at a downtown hotel and a series of telephone calls, the junior senator won financial backing from a group of 16 prominent Democratic donors known as IMPAC. They promised to raise $250,000 apiece – a total of $4 million.

Today, some of Gore's people dispute the amount and downplay the importance of Landow and his team. But others say the money itself was almost secondary to the psychological boost it provided. Money, Gore discovered, could make a junior senator from Tennessee a player in national politics. "It brought attention to Gore, who at the time was 39 and had not been taken seriously" as a presidential contender, says Roy Neel, the vice president's former chief of staff.

Despite the cash, things didn't break Gore's way that year. Almost one year to the day after entering the 1988 presidential campaign, he was out of it again and saddled with $2 million in campaign debt.

If he hoped to hang on to his Senate seat in two years and maintain his political viability beyond then, Gore knew he had to eliminate that debt quickly. "It had become almost a graveyard of former campaigns that were unable to pay off their debts," says Neel, recalling how debt had destroyed former senator John Glenn's presidential ambitions. "You live in political purgatory."

So Gore and Peter Knight, his most trusted aide, created the "40-40 Club," a catchy name for the unglamorous task of convincing 40 people to raise $40,000 apiece – to bail out a presidential loser. Gore himself worked the phones and helped squeeze every last dollar out of donors. He called them on their cell phones, at vacation homes, on boats. He checked in with his lead fund-raisers to see who was on target to reach the $40,000 and who needed a nudge, a pep talk or just plain help.

In less than three months, Gore and the 40-40 Club had raised the money to retire the debt and headed to Nashville for a black tie celebration at the governor's mansion.

Other combatants in the 1988 struggle were left with debts to pay off, and they did. But none executed the odious task with the energy or efficiency of Al Gore. He learned a simple but invaluable lesson about the changing nature of modern presidential politics. "Money was a big factor," he told the Knoxville News-Sentinel in fall 1988. "We did extremely well in raising money, but this race this time around required you to raise $20 million to $30 million instead of $10 million."

Never again, in other words, would he be underfunded.

The Big Time

The answer would lie in part in Gore's ability to take on even the most difficult chores with the focus and rigor that Clinton sometimes seemed to lack – including the grueling task of fund-raising for a national campaign.

By the time Gore joined the Democratic ticket, most of Clinton's campaign money had been raised, but Gore was eager to demonstrate his worth. Within 24 hours of being tapped by Clinton, Gore had raised $1 million in soft money, according to Knight.

Soon after, at a party in Maine, Gore topped every fund-raising record in state history, helping bring in $350,000 in a single night. Then he raised $375,000 at a single event in Connecticut.

"It was symbolic," says Neel. "He wanted to do his part."

Three years later, with Clinton's reelection in serious doubt, much the same motivation prompted Gore to take the lead on what would prove to be the most ambitious presidential fund-raising drive in history. The electoral picture looked bleak. In the first 100 days of that year, the newly installed Republican majority in the House had passed every item in its 10-point "Contract With America" except term limits. Polls showed Clinton's job approval was well below 50 percent and voters were inclined to support any Republican over him. Many inside the White House feared a nasty Democratic primary fight.

"Gore had put himself in the same boat [as Clinton] and it was sinking," says a lobbyist who raised large sums for Clinton-Gore. "This was as much a commitment to protecting his own image and reputation. The only way to stop the potential primary bleed was to get the money in quick. If Clinton went down, Gore went down."

In June 1995, the Clinton-Gore team held its first money event of the campaign at the vice president's residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory. "He decided he really wanted to help early and engage his support network on behalf of the reelect," recalls Mel Levine, a former California congressman and current Gore fund-raiser.

Dubbed "The Vice President's Salute to the President," the party was for Gore's most loyal network of supporters. To attend the event, each had to raise $25,000 by June and promise to raise another $25,000 by fall.

As always, Gore was well prepped. His briefing materials instructed him: "During the cocktail party, please mingle with the guests – please be sure to thank everyone for generous support – this type of fund-raising is very difficult and time consuming, since contributions are limited to $1,000."

At the end of the evening, each guest received a signed, numbered sketch of Clinton and Gore by artist Peter Max. Collectively, the group brought in about $1.3 million, making it one of the six most lucrative events of the campaign.

"It sent the right signal to the president and the president's team and to the political community that he is a total player," says Tony Coelho. "It was a very, very shrewd decision."

Gore's "salute" was the first in a series of wildly successful fund-raisers for the Democratic ticket. With McAuliffe in the lead and Gore and Knight deeply involved, the campaign raised a record $26 million from April 1995 to the end of the year.

By 1996, as the primary fund-raising gave way to soft money efforts, the Clinton-Gore machine began to overheat. There were the coffees in the White House Map Room, the sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom, a $50,000 check delivered to Hillary Clinton's chief of staff and, ultimately, $3.8 million in dubious or outright illegal contributions returned by the Democratic National Committee.

And Al Gore – honest, dutiful, reliable Al Gore, whose name had never been attached to scandal – was right at the center of it all. By Election Day, he'd been the main attraction at more than three dozen fund-raising events, generating about $8.7 million for the party, according to DNC records. And Gore made sure he got due credit for every penny. In an undated memo in preparation for a meeting with Clinton, Gore wrote, "I did three events this week which were projected to raise $650,000, and under rigorous accounting, actually raised $800,000. For the month, Tipper and I were supposed to do $1.1 million, and it looks like we will be closer to $1.3 million."

Gore also brought prominent contributors to his official residence for "donor stroking" events. Alone, or with Clinton, he attended more than 30 White House coffees. And, as the whole world would soon learn, he made 52 fund-raising calls from his White House office that raised more than $795,000, according to a deposition by DNC general counsel Joseph Sandler.

Gore was a diligent, even enthusiastic, dialer. In one November 1995 meeting, according to notes taken by his deputy chief of staff, David Strauss, the vice president said: "Count me in on the calls." Gore was so eager to round up cash for the reelection effort that he questioned why Clinton was down for 18 to 20 calls and he was only being asked to make 10. "Is it possible to do a reallocation for me to take more of the events and the calls?" he asked, according to Strauss's notes.

One friend who has listened to Gore solicit contributions says the vice president would often sit at his desk, fiddling with his computer while chatting up a potential donor. Working off "call sheets" that listed the target's name and how much money he was to ask for, Gore would be blunt. "I've been tasked with raising $2 million and you're on my list,' " this ally quotes him as saying, adding, "This is something he grudgingly does, but he's got the rap down."

And then there was the Buddhist temple. On April 29, 1996, the vice presidential entourage pulled into the circular driveway of the Hsi Lai Temple, a sprawling complex bordered by Oriental gardens and red pillars, in the Hacienda Heights suburb of Los Angeles. A high school marching band greeted Gore as he entered a courtyard to place flowers before a shrine to Buddha. Before entering the dining hall, he posed for photos with a group of VIP guests.

Although Gore made no direct pitch for money, numerous memos and e-mail messages written by Gore and staffers had described the gathering as a "fund-raiser" and referred to the "ticket price" of the event. Aides traveling with the vice president on his California swing told reporters the event was a fund-raiser. And when the contributions were tallied, the DNC was $140,000 richer. The only problem was that it's illegal to host partisan fund-raisers at nonprofit institutions – including churches and temples. That, and the fact that it turned out that more than half of the money had apparently come from overseas or had been illegally funneled through straw donors.

Gore's explanations only fueled further questions. First he said the temple visit was a "community outreach" event. Later, he amended that to say he knew it was a "finance related" event, but still not a "fund-raiser." Finally in a television interview he offered this explanation: "I did not know that it was a fund-raiser. But I knew it was a political event, and I knew there were finance people that were going to be present and so that alone should have told me, 'This is inappropriate and this is a mistake; don't do this.' And I take responsibility for that. It was a mistake."

No matter. The image of the vice president grubbing for dollars inside a monastery stuck like mud.