It looks like Ryan Sager of the New York Post has opened quite a nifty vein in the debate over campaign finance reform with his column last week about the goings on at the Pew Charitable Trusts. It seems that a former program officer of Pew, Sean Treglia, gave a speech acknowledging that Pew and other foundations spent millions of dollars “to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot” in favor of a law limiting contributions to political parties and restricting campaign advertising. The campaign, which Mr. Treglia credited with helping to get the law passed, was funded with $123 million from eight liberal foundations.

Part of the news here is the dishonesty of the Pew approach to getting its way in Congress, at least if you take the words the Post quoted from Mr. Tregalia at face value (and no one is questioning the accuracy of the quotations that were reported in the Post). The erstwhile program officer for Pew actually boasted of trying to keep Pew in the background. “If Congress thought this was a Pew effort,” he said of the “grassroots” movement it was funding, “it’d be worthless. It’d be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain.” Pew has since been quoted by the Post as denying it tried to deceive, but it sounds to us like Mr. Sager, an erstwhile colleague here at the Sun, got the spirit of the thing just right.

Another part of the news is the hypocrisy of the advocates of campaign finance “reform.” They are going around bemoaning the evil influence of money on politics, while spending millions to get the 2002 McCain-Feingold law passed. If it’s bad for money to buy action in Washington, why isn’t it just as bad when the campaign finance crowd are the ones doing the purchasing? After all, $123 million is a lot of money, even in Washington. What’s the difference between Pew and big oil, big pharma, big tobacco, the trial lawyers, the Indian tribes, or big labor?

We happen to think it’s okay to spend money in politics. Money is speech. These foundations may have avoided spending money via the techniques they banned. That is, they didn’t give any “soft money” unlimited contributions to the Democratic or Republican Party, and they didn’t pay for any television commercials attacking incumbents just before an election. But it would have been fine by us if they had. What is the point, though, of banning one form of spending if special interests like Pew are going to go shove money into the political process by a different method?

The fact is that the “reforms” the foundations paid for won’t really get money out of politics. The oil, drug, and tobacco companies, the Indian tribes, trial lawyers and labor unions are already learning from the liberal foundations, and rather than donating to political parties, they are increasingly creating their own impressions of mass movements by funding experts and front groups and Web sites and radio programs. Which is also fine with us. It amounts to interest groups spending money on political speech. There should be more of it in America, not less of it.

When the Pew scandal has run its course it will illuminate nothing so much as the fact that the error of the campaign speech restriction lobby in America is not a matter of tactics, but of substance. The irony isn’t only that the liberal foundations spent so much money trying to get the campaign-speech limits passed. It is that the rest of the big money groups – from guns to oil – allowed themselves to be beaten at their own game by, of all people, the Pew Charitable Trusts. Old Jos. Pew, a founder of Sun Oil Company, is probably having a good chuckle at the antics his descendants are pulling with the money he made.