It looks like we hit a nerve. In an editorial on Monday titled “Calling McCain and Feingold,” we pointed up how campaign speech regulation posing as reform has perverted the political process by divorcing campaign messages from the actual candidates. A prime example of this, we noted, was a controversial ad in the Tennessee Senate race, an ad attacking the Democratic candidate, Harold Ford. Both the Republican candidate in that race, Robert Corker, and the chairman of the Republican National Committee that funded the ad, Kenneth Mehlman, were distancing themselves from the ad. Voters couldn’t know whom to hold accountable because federal law bars candidates like Mr. Corker from coordinating with parties. The ad was, in effect, an orphan.

Now, in a letter reprinted nearby, one of the architects of the latest round of campaign “reform,” Senator Feingold, tries to convince us that the laws he champions have not eviscerated the First Amendment and poisoned the political process. He’ll have to try harder. For one thing, he has misread us. He appears to think we are disgruntled about the rising role of 527 groups in politics. We can assure him we’re not. Nor are we disgruntled with spending by political parties. No doubt he’s going to try to use the controversy kicked up by the 527s as license to go for more regulation on campaign speech.

He appears to agree, however, that the current edifice of campaign finance regulation makes it hard for candidates to deliver a message that is entirely theirs. He admits as much when he writes that coordination is disallowed between candidates and the outside groups that engage in so much advertising these days. He points out that we erred in failing to point out that such coordination was banned even before he and Senator McCain moved to block ordinary Americans from funding their candidates.

As we noted in our earlier editorial, we don’t object to so-called negativity in advertising. “Negativity” is often merely code for “inconvenient facts a candidate doesn’t want voters to hear.” Nor do we object to spending by 527s or by parties. Our beef is with the ban on coordination between such groups and the candidates. The ban on coordination cuts off the candidates from the people who would like to support them. Voters will decide which messages they find more compelling when they go to the polls. It’s just unfortunate that, thanks to the kind of anti-coordination law championed by Senator Feingold, it will be harder for them to figure out which messages truly speak for candidates.