BEDFORD, N.H.--Republican presidential candidate Senator John S. McCain (R-Ariz.) couldn't have known that the same day he had selected to take a hard line stand against soft money would turn out to be a record-shattering day for campaign fundraising.

Before a crowd of 300 Wednesday at the town hall here, McCain put forward his plan to reform the current campaign finance system, which he called "nothing less than an elaborate influence peddling scheme."

Later that day, in San Francisco, Texas Gov. George W. Bush announced that he had collected $36.2 million in campaign contributions--roughly six times as much as McCain, twice as much as Democratic frontrunner Vice President Al Gore '69 and more than any other presidential candidate in history has ever raised at this point in the election cycle.

Reforming the way in which candidates for public office raise money has become the central issue of McCain's campaign. And while McCain did not mention Bush by name in his speech, it is exactly Bush's kind of fundraising that supporters of campaign finance reform hope to end.

"I want to take our politics and our government back from the special interests," McCain told supporters Wednesday. He has proposed to outlaw soft money contributions to political parties, donations that now go unregulated.

"As long as special interests dominate campaigns, they will dominate legislation as well," McCain said, pointing to the difficulty legislators have encountered when trying to reform programs like Social Security and Medicare where donors' interests are at stake. "Until we abolish soft money, Americans will never have a government that works as hard for them as it does for the special interests."

McCain is not the only presidential hopeful making campaign finance reform an issue in the primaries, though he is the only Republican who has made the issue so central to his campaign.

Both Democratic presidential candidates, Gore and former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, support campaign finance reform. But Bradley, the underdog in the Democratic race, has been the more vocal proponent of reform.

"We need a president to put it on the top of his list," Bradley said in an April speech to Dartmouth students, calling campaign finance reform an issue of "paramount importance."