As presidential candidates prepare to post record breaking fund-raising totals, backers of the last major effort to regulate the flow of money into politics, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, are celebrating its fifth anniversary today.

With many observers predicting that White House hopefuls will announce a cumulative first-quarter take well in excess of $100 million, there is no indication that the spigot of campaign cash has been restricted. Supporters of the 2002 finance measure, usually referred to by the names of its two Senate sponsors, Senator McCain of Arizona and Senator Feingold of Wisconsin, or by an acronym, Bcra, contend that the law’s purpose was misunderstood.

“The idea of Bcra wasn’t really to get the money out of politics or to stop campaign spending,” a professor of government at Colby College, Anthony Corrado Jr., said. “The notion was to get the candidates and the parties out of the business of unregulated money. … It posed a threat of candidates asking for $250,000 or $1 million from people with business before Congress.”

Mr. Corrado said one of the main effects predicted by critics of McCain-Feingold, a weakening of the political parties, did not materialize. “The parties have remained very strong,” he said. The professor said the parties made up for about $500 million in so-called soft money gifts from large donors by adding lots of smaller gifts through direct mail and the Internet. “The parties have added over a million new donors,” Mr. Corrado said.

The McCain-Feingold law slightly increased contribution limits in presidential primaries to $2,300 this year from $2,000 five years ago. However, the chief impact of the legislation on the presidential race may be as a political liability for one of its authors, Mr. McCain, who is also seeking the Republican presidential nomination. His involvement with the campaign finance regulation bill has been one of the factors dampening his popularity with Republican faithful.

At a meeting of conservatives earlier this month, a former Massachusetts governor also seeking the GOP nod, Mitt Romney, got a roar of applause when he said the so-called reform measure violates First Amendment rights. “If I’m elected president, I will fight to repeal McCain-Feingold,” Mr. Romney declared.

Through aides, Messrs. McCain and Feingold declined to comment for this article.

Presidential candidates from both major parties are scrambling for checks in advance of Saturday’s first-quarter reporting deadline, which will be the first opportunity to test the financial prowess of the various campaigns. On the Democratic side, Senator Clinton is expected to lead the pack by raising more than $25 million. That total, when combined with up to $11 million in cash she can transfer from her Senate campaign account, could leave the New York senator with a decided advantage over her nearest rivals for the party’s nomination, Senator Obama and John Edwards. In the Republican field, Mr. Romney is likely to have the most impressive numbers, equal to or larger than Mrs. Clinton’s tally.

In the last presidential campaign, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts started his fund-raising even earlier in the cycle, at the tail end of 2002. However, the $ 7 million he raised in the first quarter of 2003, and the $7.5 million raised by his then rival, Mr. Edwards, are trifling sums compared with the figures Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are expected to bring in this quarter. The incumbent in the 2004 race, President Bush, did not begin raising money for his bid until June 2003.

In the last contested race for the Republican nomination, Mr. Bush squeezed $7.6 million during the first quarter of 1999, while Mr. McCain brought in $1.7 million.

A Democratic campaign operative, Joseph Trippi, said he is stunned at the pace of this year’s money race. “Hillary Clinton in one week is raising what Bill Clinton set a record raising in a whole quarter,” Mr. Trippi said. “That’s pretty damn amazing.”

Mr. Trippi, who ran the 2004 presidential campaign of a Vermont governor, Howard Dean, said some of the high-dollar fund-raising may not be sustainable. “The danger is really the dependence on the big money,” he said, noting that donors cannot give again once they have spent $2,300 on the primary and $2,300 for the general election campaign. “If I’ve got a million people who’ve given me $25, I can go back to every one of those people,” the Democratic operative and Web guru said.

Campaigning in Iowa yesterday, Mrs. Clinton complained about the grueling schedule of fund-raising events. “The amount of time we have to spend really undermines the political debate and dialogue,” she told the Associated Press. “We should be out talking to people.”
Mr. Edwards has expressed disappointment at how the McCain-Feingold bill has worked. “If it’s had any effect, I can’t tell. Honestly, people find other ways to get around it and to get the money into the system,” the former senator said at a forum in California late last year. “If we really want to get money out of politics, we actually have to get it out, and that means public financing for all political campaigns.”
Meanwhile, five years after Mr. Bush signed the measure, legal jockeying over McCain-Feingold goes on. The Supreme Court, which upheld almost all of the law in 2003, recently promised to take up a new challenge this year to a provision that bans corporate or union-funded television and radio ads referring to candidates for a certain time before each election.

“It’s censorship. Why mince words?” an attorney with a libertarian group, the Institute for Justice, Steve Simpson, said. He said new proposals to restrict the activities of so-called 527 groups that flourished in recent election cycles will only compound the problem. “Campaign finance laws are always just a fool’s errand. You can’t keep money out of politics,” he said.