With the death of Deng Xiaoping, China's political future is once again in the spotlight. Debate over the viability of the current political regime in China started immediately after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown when the prospects for reform in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the fate of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) projected by China watchers were then overwhelmingly pessimistic (Ditmer 1989; Swaine 1989). Eight years after the Tiananmen Square events, the survival of the CCP against all odds (including the aftermath of the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) is in itself no small miracle. The post-Tiananmen political regime in China has by and large been stable. Not only has the CCP survived, it has made impressive economic progress in recent years. This new development has caused a major reassessment of the situation in the PRC among China watchers. Nicholas Kristoff, in the New York Times (1993), called the phenomenon of China's rapid economic growth in an authoritarian environment the “riddle of China.” One China specialist even posed the question whether China is where Samuel Huntington's “third wave” stopped and whether the PRC would be an exception to the fall of communism worldwide (Nathan 1993).

The most often cited factors accounting for the political tranquillity in the PRC are its remarkable economic growth and its political oppression (Nathan 1993). These two factors are certainly indispensable in understanding developments in China after 1989.

“I'm extremely excited to have a prescene [sic] on the Web.”

The perpetual greeting from the campaign home page of Senator Carl Levin (1996) shows that as with the adoption of any new technology, Internet use by political candidates will undergo some early rough spots. The early stages of a technology also tend to prompt divergent claims about the merits of the new technology. Thus, while political scientist David Canon has praised campaign sites as a “positive development” for allowing the transmission of extensive information, Ted Becker, another political scientist, has been highly critical of the sites calling them “cyberfluff” (Skiba 1995). By systematically studying the content of 1996 Senate candidate home pages, this article offers some hope for reconciling the divergent claims about Internet campaigning.

Campaign finance today is characterized by an expanding political arena in which significantly increasing amounts of money flow in novel and constantly changing ways. A generation ago, the cutting edge was that, rather than relying on the political parties, candidates were raising and spending money to advance their own candidacies. Today, the candidate-centered campaign is conventional, and the trend is away from spending that is under candidates' control and towards a broad range of new actors engaged in a wide array of political activities. Whole new categories of players (e.g., bundlers and groups which spend money to communicate with voters about candidates but which do not coordinate their activities with any candidate or party) now operate outside of the rules set up for the system as it existed in 1974. And whole new categories of money (e.g., soft money and party spending undertaken independently of any candidate's campaign) are unregulated, subject only to limited disclosure.

The New Realities pose new problems. And these new problems require New Thinking; many reform ideas advanced in the past few years simply will not work in today's campaign finance environment.

Specifically, the problems of today's campaign finance system fall under three headings. We identify each of these problems and recommend steps to address it. However, before tackling reform, we note that it is time for diminished expectations; given our conflicting goals and the constitutional, political, and pragmatic restraints of the American system, regulation will not give us everything we might want.

It is time for a new way of thinking about secrecy.

Secrecy is a form of government regulation. Americans are familiar with the tendency to over-regulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.

Excessive secrecy has significant consequences for the national interest when, as a result, policymakers are not fully informed, government is not held accountable for its actions, and the public cannot engage in informed debate. This remains a dangerous world; some secrecy is vital to save lives, bring miscreants to justice, protect national security, and engage in effective diplomacy. Yet as Justice Potter Stewart noted in his opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, when everything is secret, nothing is secret. Even as billions of dollars are spent each year on government secrecy, the classification and personnel security systems have not always succeeded at their core task of protecting those secrets most critical to the national security. The classification system, for example, is used too often to deny the public an understanding of the policymaking process, rather than for the necessary protection of intelligence activities and other highly sensitive matters.

The classification and personnel security systems are no longer trusted by many inside and outside the Government. It is now almost routine for American officials of unquestioned loyalty to reveal classified information as part of ongoing policy disputes—with one camp “leaking” information in support of a particular view, or to the detriment of another—or in support of settled administration policy.