What did he say about McCain-Feingold?
I'll try to summarize his lengthy answer as best I can.
Basically, he said most of us agree there must be *some* limits on campaign contributions to candidates ("even Barry Goldwater was for that"). But, the traditional $1000 per person per candidate was too low; it favored incumbents because it made it very hard for a challenger to get any traction.
Meanwhile, soft contributions were just a back door way of corrupting the system. So, he used McCain-Feingold to increase the per-person contribution limit while at the same time fixing much of what was wrong with soft money.
He also said in retrospect, the limits on advertising were the wrong thing to do and should not have been in the bill.
I'm sure I didn't do justice to his reasoning. LinnKeyes2000 was there, too; hopefully, he'll see this and can do better.
Here you go...Thompson Defends Campaign Donation Limit
...At an eastern Iowa campaign event, a man in the audience said he liked the former Tennessee senator's conservative thinking on most issues but questioned his support for the McCain-Feingold Act....
Thompson said contribution limits had been in place for many years at the $1,000 level, but he believed that was too low. He says he helped to double that amount and bring it into line with inflation. Currently, the limit on contributions is $2,300.
"The rule has been, you've got to have money to run in politics, but we're not going to make the amount so high that it looks as though there is undue influence," he said.
Thompson said he doesn't like some provisions in the McCain-Feingold legislation, including one that limits contributions to some political organizations to the same level as individual contributions.
"That was an error. I was wrong about that, I wouldn't do that again," he said.
He blamed former President Clinton and political consultant Dick Morris for a windfall of soft money in the 1990s that corrupted the system and led to the need for reform.
"They didn't invent it, but they pretty much did, and they certainly perfected it, the so-called soft money deal," Thompson said.
Instead of blowing the whistle on such corruption, he said Republicans joined up.
"We started doing the same thing, and it became a soft-money race. The little guy ... got lost in the shuffle," he said.