The state's regime of campaign finance law is supposedly designed to ensure an equitable playing field, limit and/or expose the "corrupting" influence of money, and generally provide information about the campaigns to the public.

Well, read through the major campaign finance related stories of the year and tell me whether or not it's working:

1) Christine Gregoire appears to have benefited from tribal contributions to the State Democratic Party. Whatever the technical defenses offered, this one doesn't look good to the general public.

2) Gregoire's biggest financial supporters do well in the policy world too under a Gregoire administration. Yes, truly shocking I know - life under preferred candidate's governance is good for supporters. Money quote (pun intended):

"Absolutely it was money well spent," Mary Lindquist, president of the Washington Education Association (WEA), said of the donations the teachers union gave that year.

3) The state GOP is under fire for its mailers during the August primary. At issue: get-out-the-vote activities, which legally are not supposed to advocate for individual candidates, can be paid for by less stringently controlled "exempt" contributions. Advocacy for individual candidates is supposed to occur using more heavily regulated "non-exempt" contributions.

The state party appears to be challenging the legal issues, and perhaps the underlying law, at hand outright. I don't know if they're legally on solid ground or not - though its a heckuva peculiar year to wage that war. Yet, consider this: what is the ultimate purpose of GOTV activities? To have voters cast ballots on behalf of specific candidates.

So, how productive - and realistic - is that delineation in state law separating out those two activities? In the real world of politics: not very.

4) Respective allies on both sides of the Governor's race have been pouring money into the contest via "independent expenditures" that are not coordinated with the campaigns themselves. The rub is that in the not-so-large political community of our state, the relevant actors usually know each other personally (including across the aisle). "Independent" in terms of political reporting means the expenditure is not coordinated.

Does that mean the candidate/campaign are truly "independent," lacking a relationship with the side they seek to support? No, usually not.

5) The latest twist in campaign finance question marks now seeks to take that exceptionally large gray area of the law and turn it into headline generating litigation just weeks from Election Day. Thus, a left-of-center legal activist and a left-of-center interest group are actively trying to claim that Dino Rossi broke campaign finance laws - even if only in "spirit" - because he had conversations with people last May who are now independently supporting his race for Governor (initial report here, latest news on the story here).

Does it matter that the PDC called the complaint in question "vague" and refused to open an investigation into the matter? No. Our legal and regulatory system in question allows spurious, headline generating lawsuits by naked partisans out of a supposed "public interest."

The ultimate issue is that campaign finance "reformers" have long since operated under the belief that money in politics is evil. It, though it be a form of speech, should be heavily regulated - or at least be litigated in public a month before an election when the money/speech in question benefits their opponents.

Yet, the laundry list of stories above reveals instances of action that are actually legal within our campaign finance system, or earnestly insisted to be legal by attorneys on one side of the dispute. Yet in all cases, it is very easy to construe a conflict of interest absent the black and white world campaign finance reformers apparently wish to create, where politicians and those that seek to support them can hardly ever speak to one another.

Simply put, since government can't regulate relationships, it will never be able to regulate the appearance of conflict of interest - especially in the hands of partisans eager to turn any collection of facts into a political advantage.

Not that any of the stories above lend themselves to that activity or anything.

That's why our current system of campaign finance regulations isn't working and, furthermore, has no hope of doing so based on part of the flawed premise of its creation.