Campaign finance reform is political gasoline.

Political gasoline for Senator John McCain, that is. It keeps his political campaign bus on the road, but if too much gets into the air he'll end up in the middle of a fuel-air bomb.

The latest news (via Tapscott's Copy Desk and Instapundit): the Democratic commissioners of the FEC vote to uphold a ban on paid political broadcast ads criticizing incumbant politicians within 60 days of a general election.

The political gasoline for Senator McCain is that campaign-finance reform underscores his status among politcal moderates as the Republican MAC daddy (i.e. the leading Minimally Acceptable Conservative politician) . Mushy moderates want a politics that looks like happy faces and squeaky cleanliness, even when politicians are still screwing each over behind the scenes, and that's what Senator McCain is offering.

Campaign-finance reform also resonates with Senator McCain's "big-government" conservatism. Remember the 1994 Hillarycare debacle that cost Democrats control of congress? Democrats (and apparently every establishment politician to the Left of George F. Will) blamed independently purchased "issue ads" as the key weapon that torpedoed Hillarycare. The future of Big Government politics was thrown into doubt: how would permanent, massively expensive government entitlement programs ever be enacted again if any conservative wannabe could buy public broadcast time to try and shout them down? So, ever since 1994, the bipartisan campaign for campign-finance reform sponsered by Senators McCain and Feingold and President Clinton has declared independent political activity public enemy number one.

The fuel-air bomb for Senator McCain is that his reputation as the Senate's leading champion of campaign-finance reform will be countered in the 2008 elections by Senator Hillary Clinton and her reputation (along with her husband) as the leading champion of campaign-finance violations. First of all, campaign-finance reform has already blown up once with the 2000 NY senatorial election. Rick Lazio and his pathetically named, McCain-inspired campaign bus "The Mainstream Express" was little more than Republican cannon-fodder against Hillary Clinton.

Secondly, the 2008 McCain versus Clinton race is likely to play out a lot like this. Clinton shamelessly violates every financing law on the books and McCain doesn't. McCain cries fowl and cites his own legislation to make his case. Clinton energizes her Democratic base and wins a lot of Republican votes by taking a stand on the First Amendment to defend herself. The mainstream media, to the considerable Schadenfreude of the conservative movement, finally betrays McCain with a loud cry of "Sexism!" and proclaims Clinton the "victim" of "censorship" by her "bullying" opponent. McCain finds himself choosing between unilaterally obeying the rules anyway and watching his politcal career get blown to smithereens by an exultant Clinton, or by violating his own laws to stay competitive in the election, thus admitting that his campaign-finance reforming was nothing but a gigantic self-aggrandizing fraud.

There is still another upside for conservatives if McCain wins the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2008. If campaign-finance reform is the political gasoline of the McCain campaign, his devastating loss to Clinton in 2008 will at least produce something akin to the sweet smell of napalm in the morning.