My sense from here is that our readers -- and I believe this to be true throughout Florida -- gave up on the hearings before they opened, prejudging that they would be riddled with partisanship and designed to point up the obvious, which is that the entire system is rotten. So far neither notion appears to be incorrect.

There may be some parochial reasons, too, why folks down here are not paying attention. For openers, this is a community where the notion of "foreign" money in politics isn't particularly new or startling (although if Fidel Castro slipped a few bucks to the Democrats, the interest level would be astronomical). Also, with so much scandal and corruption to deal with on the local level, things in Washington, D.C. seem a little pedestrian, distant and bordering on the irrelevant.

This is not to say that Floridians don't believe campaign reform is necessary; they do. Florida state laws on campaign finance are among the toughest, if not the toughest, in the nation. I think people here simly don't believe that campaign-finance reform is the ultimate goal of these hearings. They suspect it's stagecraft.

The campaign finance flap in Washington is barely making ripples in Utah.

"No one seems to want to talk about it here," said Meg Holbrook, the state Democratic Party chair. Instead, Utahns gripe a lot about traffic, since a massive highway reconstruction program has just begun, and the travails of the former chief of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, who resigned last week with a $2 billion golden parachute after being accused of abusing his wife.

The congressional hearings did, however, provide GOP Sen. Bob Bennett with crowd-rousing material weekend [Aug. 2]. A member of the Senate panel conducting the fund-raising investigation, he regaled a Republican women's club with his spin on the hearings -- about the President inviting "criminals and pimps into the White House," religious cultists contributing to the Clinton's legal defense fund and Democrats accepting cash from Asians whose fortunes were made from gamblers and prostitution.

Bennett, a freshman who is expected to run for reelection next year, had E. Howard Hunt on the payroll of his Washington public relations firm at the time of the Watergate break-in and fired him soon after. He also helped established the committees for Nixon's fundraising efforts that year.