WASHINGTON -Bradley Smith appears relaxed for a man at the center of the gathering storm that could topple the embattled federal agency in charge of enforcing campaign finance law.

A mild-mannered, soft-spoken former law professor with a steely belief in the freedom of speech, the chairman of the Federal Election Commission epitomizes much of what critics say is wrong with the agency.

He openly disagrees with most of the laws he is paid to enforce, and it was this skepticism that got him appointed in the first place.

“Just think if a person was appointed to run the Drug Enforcement Agency who thought the drug laws were all unconstitutional and wrong. That kind of person is now functioning as the head of the FEC,” said one of the agency’s most vociferous critics, the president of the watchdog group Democracy 21, Fred Wertheimer.

Senator McCain of Arizona and the congressional sponsors of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law are now pushing legislation to abolish the agency. The campaign has gained momentum from the commission’s refusal to impose contribution limits on so-called 527 groups, which have used lavish donations to run prominent attack ads against the presidential candidates. In the ever more bilious campaign to get rid of the current six commissioners and change the way future commissioners are chosen, Mr. Smith is target No. 1. It is not hard to see why.

“I think there are a lot of things that should be deregulated,” Mr. Smith told The New York Sun. “I think most of the restrictions do more harm than good. We really need to start thinking harder about the costs of some of the campaign finance regulation,” he said.

In an ideal world, he said, “I think I would keep the disclosure requirements, but I would let people spend what they want to spend and give what they want to give.”

In the real world, he would like to see the individual contribution limit raised, and the ban lifted on political contributions by small and non-profit corporations.

Mr. Smith also does not hide his opposition to the justification for campaign finance laws: to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption. “I don’t think there is much empirical evidence to show that campaign contributions have much to do with corruption,” he said, adding that more money is spent on lobbying.

The armada of supporters of stricter campaign finance regulations point to the hundreds of millions of dollars in soft money given to the political parties in the 1990s, which fueled the perception that the wealthy and corporations were buying access, if not favors. They blamed the commission for not regulating soft-money, just as now they blame it for turning a blind eye to the 527 groups.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was successfully defended before the Supreme Court in Mc-Connell v. FEC. Arguments like Mr. Smith’s that the law violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech lost in court.

But in a speech after the Supreme Court ruling, Mr. Smith said, “Now and then, the Supreme Court issues a decision that cries out to the public, ‘We don’t know what we are doing.’ Mc-Connell is such a decision.”

His critics point to these comments as betraying his unfitness for a job in law enforcement.

“I like the guy personally but in no way should he be serving on the Federal election commission,” said a campaign finance lobbyist for group Public Citizen, Craig Holman. “He is the lightening rod for the whole movement” to replace the commission with a nonpartisan group of appointees and a cabinet-level appointee accountable to the president, he said.

For a man blamed for so much, Mr. Smith lacks the bombast of a Washington power broker. With his polite Midwestern manners and earnest graduate student-style enthusiasm for the details of constitutional law, he seems younger than his 46 years. He betrays little bitterness for someone who has been denounced since the day his name was first floated for the job some five years ago. “It comes with the territory,” he shrugged. “My goal has been to enforce the law to the best of my ability.

“The proper role of the commission is to enforce the law. Not to make up the law. Not to step on Congress’ prerogatives. Not to overreach,” he said. He believes that advocates of deeper regulation should take their demands to Congress.

The vice-chairwoman of the commission, Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat who occasionally sides with Mr. Smith and who also opposed the proposed 527 rules, bristles at the long-standing venomous attacks on the agency, and on Mr. Smith in particular.

“He has studied the law in-depth. He has read all the Supreme Court opinions. He takes a different view of it. That doesn’t mean he is ignoring the law. He just reads it differently. People can come to different conclusions,” she said.

Senator McCain has called Mr. Smith “a right-wing ideologue” and Ms. Weintraub “a political apparatchik” of the Democratic Party.

“I wish that everyone in this debate could engage in the debate with a little more respect for opposing points of view,” she said.

Ms. Weintraub said accusations that Mr. Smith puts his ideology before the law “not entirely fair.” “I have seen him apply the law in cases where he said, ‘This would not have been my policy choice,’ ” she said.

Mr. Smith grew up in a working-class suburb of Detroit in a “moderate Republican” family. He is the son of a schoolteacher father and a full-time mother. While never formally active in politics, he had a “libertarian streak” and an interest in public policy. A political science and economics major at Kalamazoo College, he spent his junior year studying in Spain.

There he met his future wife, Julie, he confides rather sheepishly, at a Granada discotheque “in the heyday of the disco era.” They have two teenage daughters and three dogs and live on five acres in rural Virginia, where Mrs. Smith writes about philosophy and theology. They keep four horses on a farm nearby.

“He and his wife take in abandoned dogs and raise and protect them. They are people who have created an ideal family life that is an example for everybody they know,” said his friend and former White House speechwriter, David Frum.

While in college, he took a part-time job at the Small Business Association of Michigan, and worked on its political action committee. In the early 1980s he joined the foreign service – “because I thought that sounded very cool” – and was sent to Ecuador where he said he did the typical tasks of a young officer – dealing with visas and “the occasional call saying, ‘My husband was bit by a monkey and what should I do.’ “

He returned to America, worked in managed health care, selling insurance policies to small businesses and other things that he says he’ll “spend a lot of time in purgatory for.” In the process, he discovered he enjoyed dealing with the law and enrolled at Harvard Law School. After graduation and a stint at a Columbus law firm, he decided on a teaching career because, “I liked the intellectual side of law.”

His first teaching job was at Capital University Law School in Columbus; he decided to teach a seminar on election law. An opinion piece he published in the Washington Times criticizing campaign finance laws caught the eye of David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“I saw it and said,’ Oh good, a law professor who understands the First Amendment on campaign issues!’ I wrote him and asked that he write a more detailed study,” recalled Mr. Boaz.

In 1996 the Yale Law Journal published Mr. Smith’s “Faulty Assumptions and Undemocratic Consequences of Campaign Finance Reform,” solidifying his reputation as a critic of the law.

Soon, he was being invited to testify before congressional committees and became a favorite of Senator Mc-Connell, a Kentucky Republican who chaired the committee that oversees the commission. A fierce critic of the campaign finance laws, Mr. Mc-Connell filed suit challenging the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold law as soon as it was signed. He also championed Mr. Smith for a seat on the commission when a Republican vacancy arose.

Because by law the commission must be composed of three Republicans and three Democrats, then-President Clinton was tasked with appointing a Republican suggested by the party leadership.

“It was so galling. … Brad Smith was appointed by Mitch McConnell to not only prevent effective campaign finance reform from being implemented, but, I swear, with a bit of humor at the same time,” said Public Citizen’s Craig Holman.

Then-Democratic Leader in the House at the time, Rep. Thomas Daschle, said the choice was like “asking Billy the Kid to enforce the peace.”

Although Mr. Clinton resisted for a time, he eventually made the nomination after Republicans blocked a group of judicial appointments in order force a vote, which passed 64 to 35. The drama of the appointment inspired an episode of the “The West Wing.”

In 2002, the congressional sponsors of the McCain-Feingold legislation asked him to recuse himself from rulemakings concerning the new law. Mr. Smith refused, explaining that he could set aside his personal views in order to fulfill “professional, ethical, and legal obligations.”

He believes that he has done so, while his critics say he has ignored the law and the Supreme Court’s ruling, especially in the case of the 527s, which the commission’s own in-house counsel has twice advised should be regulated.

But where his critics see an arrogant ideologue, his admirers see a man of principle and integrity.

“In a town where people are preoccupied in creating an impression of their own importance, Brad is about his principles and not about himself,” said Mr. Frum.

The controversy over 527s, whose prodigious fund-raising is seen to benefit Senator Kerry above all, is a case in point.

“This guy who was so hated and dreaded by Democrats, has ended up vindicating the rights of 527 committees, at a time when a lot of Republicans have turned against them,” he said.

Mr. Smith’s term ends on April 30, 2005, and he said his “general plan” is to go back to teaching. His time on the commission has not changed his core beliefs, but has heightened his concern about the impact of campaign finance laws on grassroots politics.

Money, he argues, can equalize the playing field as much as it can distort it. Restrictions on large individual donations can favor well-funded established organizations with the infrastructure to do mass-mailing campaigns.

Small groups often need a single big donor, he said, citing the controversial group the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, which has run damaging ads against Senator Kerry’s war record.

“Regardless of what you think of the message, they were able to get in the game because one guy gave them $100,000. … Why is that a bad thing?”

Since joining the commission, he said he has also become more concerned about the burden on the ordinary campaign volunteer. “We get letters saying, ‘I volunteered for this campaign and now you’re fining me $5,000.’ It puts a new spin on it,” he said.

Thirty years of regulation have not led to “a major improvement in the ways campaigns are conducted, or the tone of the campaigns,” he said.