Are Barack Obama and John McCain hypocrites?

Putting together the kind of deal Obama's campaign wants now may prove to be impossible -- anyone can set up a 527 group, and there's no way the candidates could keep a rein on every political activist who might want to try it. How could the Obama and McCain campaigns enforce a spending cap on 527s? If that's what it'll take to get an agreement between the two candidates, there probably won't be one.

Still, McCain campaign aides have plenty of expediency, as well as principles, on their own minds during this rhetorical battle. Though McCain recently set up a fundraising program modeled on President Bush's 2000 and 2004 structure -- with titles for bundlers who bring in the most cash (and on the low end, too; anyone who gives $25 can become a "McCain Ace") -- fundraising has been a problem for him the entire cycle. McCain doesn't particularly like asking contributors for money, preferring to schmooze with voters (or reporters) rather than donors. Making matters worse, the conservative base is still suspicious of him, so the grass-roots mailings and e-mails that might help him gin up some serious cash probably can't match Obama's fundraising frenzy.

If McCain's critics -- at the FEC and at the Democratic National Committee -- are right about his own legal situation, though, he's already toast financially. Because of vacancies on the FEC right now, the commission doesn't have a quorum. So it never officially accepted his request to get out of the public funding system for the primaries. If he did stay in the system, he would probably already have broken the law by spending more than the $51 million the public match allows him to burn through; by the end of January alone, McCain had spent $47 million on the primaries. An FEC ruling that he's locked into public funding would mean McCain can't spend another penny until the Republican National Convention in early September -- which would virtually guarantee that President Obama (or President Clinton) delivers the inaugural address on Jan. 20 next year.

McCain's lawyers believe that won't happen. The FEC wasn't going to give him his matching funds until later this spring if he did take the money. Since he never actually got any of the cash, the campaign thinks he's gotten out of the system by declaring he doesn't want it anymore. But the $4 million line of credit McCain opened in November (and updated in December) with Fidelity & Trust Bank, in Bethesda, Md., required McCain to promise to take the matching funds if he didn't do well in subsequent primaries. The McCain camp maintains that since he did do well, he doesn't have to take the matching funds, and that the terms of the loan stated the matching funds weren't collateral anyway. However, the whole matter is murky enough legally -- especially with the FEC on hiatus -- for critics to run with it. "He has material gain from what he has done," DNC chairman Howard Dean told reporters Sunday.

There's no question that the loan kept McCain's campaign alive -- and McCain knew it. "It was important for us to be able to afford the shoestring we were on," he joked when I asked him about it before he won the South Carolina primary last month.

Whether or not that shoestring is now turning into a noose depends on the FEC. The DNC filed a formal complaint about the loan on Monday, but that's stuck in the same legal limbo McCain is -- until the FEC has a quorum, the commission can't take action on McCain's request to leave the public funding system or the DNC's request to keep him in it.

So the whole thing will play out, as most complaints over campaign finances do, as a political drama. There, it's probably a wash. Neither side has the moral standing to make his critique stick firmly to the other one; to any voters actually paying attention to the fight, both candidates probably look bad. But already, the vision of a McCain-Obama race that raises national politics to lofty new heights is starting to fray. "Senator McCain is trying to explain some of the things that he has done so far," Obama said Tuesday night, "but people aren't exactly clear whether all of the T's were crossed and the I's were dotted." If the campaign begins with two self-styled reformers squabbling in the media over which one is actually the biggest hypocrite, it's hard not to wonder what might come next.

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