Unilaterally renouncing soft money from Big Business or Big Labor or Big Law might make Gore a purer populist, but it might also hand the election to George W. Bush and his bags of money. Grant them the point. Gore's statement was not necessarily hypocritical. Rather, it was nuts. American politics have been awash with private money since the beginning.
Reformers note, correctly, that the amounts have risen dizzyingly in recent years.
In real dollars, political spending more than quadrupled from 1952 to 1996. The current cycle appears likely to break all the records, handily. Well, something already has been done. Today's system of elaborate campaign finance laws was created in 1974. The rapid increase in political spending began after that year, in 1976.