Million-Dollar Bill

By NINA BURLEIGH/WASHINGTON

The price list offered a sliding scale of intimacy with the President. Those who paid the basic price of $1,500 a plate got a seat with 2,100 other people in the Washington Hilton ballroom to hear President Clinton speak, plus their choice of entree, either Iowa beef or Maine salmon. The 500 fatter cats in the group, who gave at least $10,000 apiece, got the bonus of an invitation to the White House for a reception. But the really big givers, those who wrote checks for between $50,000 and $100,000, gained admission to cozy cocktail parties where Clinton stopped to make small talk before his speech. Last week's presidential-encounter sessions, called An American Celebration, raised an estimated $3.5 million for the Democratic National Committee's (D.N.C.) political activities.

Clinton had promised he would never play this game. On election night 1992, the President-elect vowed from a televised stage in Little Rock, Arkansas, "to reform the political system, to reduce the influence of special interests." Last year he pledged to put an end to so-called soft money, the kind of funds he raised last week, which are unrestricted by campaign-finance laws. Rather than changing the way Washington operates, however, Clinton now works to keep the old machinery running smoothly. Headlining at Democratic fund raisers across the U.S., the President has helped bring in a record $41 million in soft money in less than two years, twice as much as the Republicans have raised during that time. "Clinton is now the king and protector of a corrupt system," says Fred Wertheimer, head of the government-watchdog group Common Cause.

Clinton's defense is that he supports the campaign-finance reform bills stalled in Congress. The legislation would limit contributions from political- action committees and ban soft money, the currently unlimited contributions to political parties used for voter registration and party-boosting activities. But Clinton has been nearly silent on the issue this year, possibly because the Democrats face a major loss of congressional seats in the fall elections. In the meantime, Clinton says he won't "disarm unilaterally" while Republicans and other enemies are still out earning money the old- fashioned way. "There's no contradiction at all," said senior adviser George Stephanopoulos. "The President has called for real reform. When the reform has passed, he will live under the rules."

Clinton's silence has coincided with the most lucrative six months in the history of the D.N.C. A March fund raiser in Miami attended by the President and First Lady netted $3.4 million. In Chicago and Beverly Hills, donors paid $5,000 apiece to hear him in recent weeks. For events in Boston, Washington, Cleveland and Houston, people paid at least $1,000 each.

The American Celebration dinner last week bristled with lobbyists, lawyers and other guests who want influence with whichever party is in power. Multiple tables were bought by representatives of insurance and health-care companies, financial conglomerates and energy concerns. The biggest soft-money contributors to the DNC are the entertainment and communications industries, which gave a combined $4.1 million during the 21 months ending in March. Leading that pack was Time Warner Inc., contributing $508,333, most of which helped underwrite the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York City. Labor unions also bought groups of tables, but their contribution to the D.N.C.'s coffers pales in comparison to that of business donations.

While critics rarely find a smoking quid pro quo, the big contributors usually have major stakes in pending legislation and regulatory rule-making. Communications companies, for example, will be profoundly affected by coming cable-TV regulations and info-superhighway policies. A lobbyist for the Travelers, which has an interest in health-care reform, contributed $100,000 last week. One of the five dinner "co-chairs" was Dwayne Andreas, chief executive of Archer Daniels Midland, who along with his wife and company contributed $270,000 to the D.N.C. between October 1992 and March 1994. (Andreas also donated hefty sums to Republicans when they held the White House.) ADM controls 80% of U.S. production of ethanol, which the Clinton Administration has proposed giving a mandated 30% of the gasoline market in the most polluted American cities. The other side of the issue was represented too: tables for $15,000 were bought by representatives of the energy companies ARCO and CITGO, which oppose the EPA rule that benefits ethanol.

Clinton's fund raising has disappointed reform-minded supporters, several dozen of whom demonstrated outside last week's event. Inside, the President delivered a passionate speech extolling the honorable motives of the donors. He urged them to vocally defend their contributions and to think of their words "as a knife that can cut through stone." He added, "And every time you hear one of your fellow Americans say some cynical and nonsensical thing implying that we're all up here just trying to feather our nest . . . you tell them the truth . . . " The audience applauded, just as the crowd did 20 months ago at the Old State House in Little Rock.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington