When we first heard that Russell Simmons — head of the record company Def Jam and the clothier Phat Farm — planned to rename temporarily a running shoe produced by his company after gubernatorial candidate H. Carl McCall, we thought it was a novel and waggish idea. As Mr. McCall’s campaign staff told us yesterday, Mr. Simmons will be a great asset to them, especially in bringing younger voters into the political process. Mr. Simmons, however, may have gotten himself in deeper than he bargained for. Mr. Simmons’s renaming of his “Phat Classic” shoe to the “Carl McCall” is not just an endorsement — it’s an expenditure. That brings him under New York State’s campaign finance laws. Last we heard from Mr. Simmons’s representatives, he met with lawyers yesterday to figure out how to navigate the legal maze, and he has another meeting planned.

The main danger Mr. Simmons faces is to be found engaging in coordination with the McCall campaign. While Mr. Simmons, or his business, is allowed to spend as much money as he wants acting on his own, a spokesman for the New York State Board of Elections, Lee Daghlian, said Mr. Simmons may have “absolutely no contact” with the McCall campaign. However, contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, the McCall campaign made it clear that there have been numerous discussions between the campaign and Mr. Simmons’s staff regarding campaign finance law concerns relating to the renamed shoe. The campaign also told the Sun that planned ads promoting the shoe, along with Mr. McCall, have yet to be drafted, but when they are, they will likely be submitted to the election regulators. Mr. Daghlian of the BOE, upon hearing of this contact, said that, “If McCall’s people know all of this, that’s coordinating. It sounds like coordinating to me.”

We point all of this out not because we think that the McCall campaign or Mr. Simmons has done anything wrong. Rather, what the incident brings into sharp relief is the absurdity of the regulation of political speech. Mr. McCall could clearly make better use of his supporter’s gift if he were not by statute forbidden to “authorize, request, suggest, foster or cooperate in” it. If Mr. McCall were to do any of these things, Mr. Simmons’s generous redesignation would become a contribution in kind to the campaign, theoretically limiting Mr. Simmons’s company to a contribu tion of $5,000. The McCall camp insists that Mr. Simmons is acting completely independently, and that is possible. But it is awfully hard to campaign for someone while keeping them at arm’s length. It would be nice to think that when the dust clears Mr. Simmons — and, for that matter, Mr. McCall — will emerge as partisans of the First Amendment against efforts to regulate campaign speech by any company or individual.