President John F. Kennedy’s most memorable line was "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

Vice President Albert Gore’s may be his mantra at his March 3 press conference: "My counsel advises me that there is no controlling legal authority or case that says that there was any violation or law whatsoever in the manner in which I asked people to contribute to our re-election campaign."

Gore’s remarkable choice of words was designed to dance around this problem: A plausible case can be made that Gore’s high-pressure fund-raising calls from his White House office amounted to federal felonies, punishable by up to three years in prison.

But a plausible case can also be made that these calls were legal, if sleazy and perhaps unprecedented. The legal question turns out to be surprisingly tricky, as does the related question (touched on in my column last week, "Janet Reno’s Burden of Proof," Page 21) of whether the attorney general should seek an independent counsel to determine whether to prosecute Gore.

The relevant statute, 18 U.S.C. §607, makes it "unlawful for any person to solicit or receive any contribution within the meaning of section 301(8) of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 [FECA] in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties by any person mentioned in section 603," which in turn mentions (among others) "officer[s] or employee[s] of the United States."

Unleashing yet another independent counsel-and perhaps another partisan Republican one, at that-to comb for years and years through the burgeoning Clinton campaign finance scandals in search of crimes, with dozens of potential targets up to and including both the president and the vice president, would be a national nightmare.

The record to date suggests that the Clinton campaign’s desperate search for money reached a level of sleaziness unrivaled since Watergate. A no-holds-barred prosecutor might be able to make a plausible legal case that crimes were committed, perhaps involving people at the top.

But no such high-level officials should be prosecuted, barring the emergence of more smoking guns than we are likely to see. Among the reasons are that many of the alleged crimes are too difficult to distinguish from the access-peddling that has long been practiced by most candidates for federal office; that some of the same theories that could be used against Clinton campaign officials (including the president) could also be used against Dole campaign officials (perhaps including Dole) and many members of Congress; that the campaign finance laws are nightmarishly complex and riddled with First Amendment problems; and that the resulting tangle of rules and loopholes often does not draw clear lines between what is legal and illegal.

A wise prosecutor, sensitive to such considerations, would err on the side of lenity and bring the matter to closure as quickly as possible. But is that what we would get from the special three-judge court, headed by D.C. Circuit Judge David Sentelle, that chooses independent counsel? The track record does not inspire confidence.

Almost everyone agrees that our federal campaign finance laws-which have spectacularly failed to reduce the influence of special-interest money in politics-are a stinking mess and should be "reformed."

The hard part is agreeing on exactly what is wrong and how to fix it. Indeed, while reform proposals abound, the problems are so daunting that it’s unclear whether the system can be fixed, by even the most brilliantly drafted law-let alone one with a chance of getting through Congress.

The polar positions espoused by libertarian conservatives (encouraging candidates to sell themselves to the highest bidders) and Utopian liberals (pressing a doomed effort to purge private money from politics) both seem deeply flawed. So does the bill co-sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), which has won endorsements from President Bill Clinton and a gaggle of editorialists less because they love it than because it’s the only game in town with even a patina of bipartisan support.

But in a penetrating cover story ("Blow It Up") in the March 29 National Journal, Jonathan Rauch makes an intriguing, ideologically eclectic proposal for a simplified system of "public financing plus private deregulation."

Rauch begins with the perception that the current system of labyrinthine regulations, "understandable only to lawyers, and sensible not even to them,… is founded on a naive faith in rules, an discriminating disgust for money and a belief that political spending can be meaningfully distinguished from political expression. All of those premises are unsupportable, and doom any system built upon them."