By: Jeanne Cummings

After the most expensive presidential campaign in history, campaign finance reformers are trying to salvage the Watergate-era public financing system by proposing substantial changes.

A key passage in the proposed reforms would significantly boost the amounts of money candidates could receive from the taxpayer-backed system. Spending limits would be raised to reflect the modern-day costs of running for office.

Those figures have been adjusted only for inflation since 1974, and their inadequacy was a major reason that major candidates began shunning the system in the past two presidential campaigns.

In this year’s presidential primaries, for instance, candidates who accepted public funding were limited to spending $50 million for the entire nomination fight. Obama, who did not take public money, spent $30 million just in the month of January.

Other legislative changes the reformers will seek include banning joint fund-raising committees and shared advertising budgets between the national parties and their presidential nominees.

They also would require candidates to reveal the names of their bundlers and the amount that each of the surrogate fundraisers generates for the campaign.

The proposed reforms were embodied in legislation introduced in the current Congress with a star-studded list of sponsors.

Among them: the president-elect, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.); the vice president-elect, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.); the incoming White House chief of staff, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.); and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Reformers say they expect the legislation to be reintroduced in January, on the first day of the new Congress.

The proposed changes are sure to meet stiff opposition from Republicans.

The legislation would make it illegal for future candidates to employ the tactics that the Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, used to compete against Obama and his army of small donors.

McCain, who participated in the presidential fundraising system, stretched his $85 million allotment of taxpayer money for the general election campaign by helping raise money for the Republican National Committee that could be spent on advertising and voter turnout operations.

Fred Wertheimer, head of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog group, acknowledged that “there are not campaign finance fights that aren’t battles, big battles.”

But he pointed to Obama’s campaign pledges to reform the presidential financing system. “I think the stage is set to do this,” Wertheimer said.

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