With evident reluctance and without ceremony, President Bush signed the McCain-Feingold bill into law last week, thereby banning “soft money” from national politics. The president then took off on a three-state fund-raising tour, pulling in a reported $4 million for the Republican Party.

It was symbolic. At least some of the money the president raised will be specifically banned by the new law, which will take effect after the November elections. Even after it takes effect, ending unlimited contributions to national political parties, how much would you bet that campaign spending and contributions will continue to increase?

I’m not a cynic, but it is worth noting that we have been trying to rid our political system of influence-peddling for almost a century. The first big effort, championed by Teddy Roosevelt (after big-money contributions to his 1904 campaign shocked the nation), banned corporate donations to federal campaigns and for the first time, required candidates to disclose contributions. It had no more effect than poor U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni is having in the Middle East.

Less than two decades later the nation was mired in the Teapot Dome scandal, in which oil developers bought off federal officials responsible for granting oil leases. It was one of the most blatant in a long and colorful history of American swindles.

You would expect campaign finance reform to at least complicate life for venal politicians, but in some cases the early reforms actually made it easier for them to sell their votes legally. Those changes limited the amount a corporation could give to a political committee, so candidates and parties simply created multiple committees. People skirted limits on the amount that individuals could give to a candidate by breaking down the gifts among extended family members. This made it harder to trace the sources of campaign money.

Spending grew steadily. The national elections in 1956 cost an estimated $156 million. By 1968, the cost was about $300 million. The Federal Election Campaign Act went into effect in 1971. It was the most sweeping election reform of the century, intended to limit both contributions and spending. A year later, the national campaign cost an estimated $425 million.

Further reforms that dramatically limited both the nature and amount of campaign gifts led to the development of soft money and “issue advertising,” which took the form of unlimited donations and spending to advance the cause of one candidate or the other without specifically endorsing one. More that $300 million was spent on issue advertising alone in the 2000 campaign without the Federal Election Commission laying a glove on it.

I am one of those who believe that true campaign finance reform will never happen indeed, that it cannot happen. And I’m not alone. A Gallup poll in 1997 asked voters whether there was any hope of reforming the system, and 59 percent of the respondents thought that “no matter what new laws are passed, special interests will always find a way to maintain their power in Washington.” No matter what laws we enact, the wealthy will try to buy influence, and some politicians will still be for sale. It has to do with free will. The concept of trust includes the possibility of betrayal.

The good news is that most politicians are not corrupt, nor are most wealthy people or corporations motivated solely by self-interest. I spent three years covering the Maryland state legislature and came to know the senators and delegates from that state fairly well. I discovered that representative democracy is truly representative, that the legislature had about the same proportion of venality, stupidity, honesty and genius as the population that elected it. By far the most dangerous politicians were not the corrupt ones, but the ideologues.

You can no more legislate sin out of politics than the human soul, but there is a way to clean up the process. It has less to do with giving than spending. If candidates were not allowed to spend any money they raised on political campaigns but instead received public funds, and if all qualified candidates had equal free access to television and radio time, then the wealthy and poor alike would have equal influence. Advocacy would depend on persuasion.

But public funding of campaigns isn’t about to happen on a large scale, though some states already have taken big steps in that direction Maine and Arizona among them. Some reformers have concentrated on the issue of TV and radio, which is the costliest part of a national political campaign.

The McCain-Feingold law will ban soft money, but as long as campaigns still cost candidates millions, people will find ways of giving, and politicians will find ways of accepting.