I attended yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in hope of finally hearing a truthful explanation come out of the mouth of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Yeah, I really do know better.  What the American public heard instead was vague denial, sorry excuses, and shoddy memory (though Mr. Gonzales was careful to avoid the phrase "I do not recall").

On the other hand, we did hear some sharp rebukes from the Senators asking the questions.

From Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT): "I just don't trust you."

From ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA): "Your credibility has been breached to the point of being actionable" and "Is your department functioning?"

From Chuck Schumer (D-NY): "How can we trust your leadership?" and "You're not being straightforward with this committee...You're deceiving us."

From Russ Feingold (D-WI): "I believe your testimony is misleading at best."

That was former Senator Warren Rudman's partial explanation, at today's hearing on the Fair Elections Now Act, for how he came around from opposition to "unequivocally supporting public financing" and the Fair Elections bill now before the Senate Rules committee.  Sitting on the second panel, he admitted that he'd grown so frustrated with the dominance of private money in politics that he found public financing to be the most sensible solution.

He wasn't alone.  The bill's cosponsors, Senators Dick Durbin and Arlen Specter, described the same transformation from opponent to champion.  Those conversions are what made today's Senate hearing so promising.

This morning the Durbin-Specter public financing bill is up for a hearing in the Senate Rules committee.  Starting at 10 a.m., you can watch that hearing live online.

The Fair Elections Now Act in the Senate is a critical reform that would upend the big-money-driven political campaign game as we know it.  We're hoping for a good hearing.  More later.

Last night on the sidelines of my weekly softball game, I was talking to a couple of friends about money in politics and the skyrocketing fundraising in the presidential race (one of the friends is a journalist covering the race, so it made some sense, and we had already determined we were going to lose the softball game).

He brought up the notion that all the talk of "the candidate who raises the most money wins" might be misleading, because perhaps it's the most popular candidates who attract the most money--so then they usually win the races, because of popularity, while raising the most money along the way. It's not a crazy argument.

But when you look at the numbers and where the money comes from, you realize that if it is true, it's mostly by luck. Here's the very simple reason why: the vast majority of Americans, 99.75%, never give more than $200 to a candidate, and most give nothing at all.

The Campaign Finance Institute ran the numbers for the presidential race and found that in the first quarter, candidates raised almost all of their money from people giving $1,000 or more. (Here are those percentages for the top three fundraisers on either side, but it's worth looking at the table for yourself: Clinton 86%, Obama 68%, Edwards 77%; Romney 88%, Giuliani 87%, McCain 74%.)

In other words, a popular candidate may end up raising more money, but that "popularity" only matters for that 0.25% of the public who give large donations to campaigns. And while yes, it's possible that this reflects overall popularity among the public, there's no certainty of that: it merely reflects popularity among the major donor class.

This also explodes the notion, which I've seen kicked around a lot lately, that the increase in small donors means a shift in political power away from the large donors. Looking at the CFI chart and the headline, "Big, $1,000+ Donations Supply 79% of Presidential Candidates' Early Money," explains that even if small donations are up, so are large donations, and candidates still spend their time courting big gifts from a relatively small group of wealthy donors. Big money still rules the game.

Which brings me to public financing, a system in which candidates can qualify for public funds for their campaign by showing broad public support in the form of very small donations. They do not have to raise millions upon millions of dollars, even for House and Senate races. Then the popularity and viability of the candidates rests on their ability to build support among a larger constituency, not just those writing the big checks, and it allows them to spend more time talking to all sorts of voters, not just big donors.

The best public financing vehicle in Congress right now is the Durbin-Specter Fair Elections Now Act in the Senate and a great article about it appeared yesterday in the journal "In These Times." It's worth a read.

No need to blow the lid off a commonly understood political fact: Special interests use campaign contributions to pay for access to lawmakers, no matter which party, and they intend to win favorable policy through these "gifts."

It's not "blowing the lid off," it's looking inside and seeing that groups like Big Agriculture are already lining the pockets of prominent Democrats: And what happened with the last farm bill? Among various pork bits were over $1 billion for people who don't farm at all. So it's no wonder that those groups are willing to spend a paltry few million this time around.

The question is what to do about it.

As you may already know, President Bush today signed into law the bill that keeps the expiring portions of the Voting Rights Act on the books for another 25 years.

But what's been more surprising has been the speed with which the bill moved through the Senate last week. That story illustrates how Congress can do amazing things in an election year.