Kimberley Strassel addresses what has been bothering me about both candidates - their rhetoric to act as if lobbying was by its very nature a dirty and corrupt profession and thus they forswear having lobbyists involved in their campaigns. The campaigns and their supporters now trade accusations as they comb through the backgrounds of everyone working on the campaigns who might have had a job as a lobbyist.

The folly of campaign finance was thinking that it was wise or possible to outlaw free speech in the form of campaign contributions. The folly of lobbyist restrictions is thinking it is wise or possible to outlaw free association, in the form of men and women who are employed to petition government, many of whom also (unsurprisingly) take a passionate interest in politics. Start down the path of weeding out every "conflict" and you'll be weeding from now until November.

There's a particularly big risk for Mr. McCain here. One of his biggest attributes is his reputation as a reformer. His record should say it all, yet he has now set a new standard on which to be judged. And the irony is that those doing the judging will be the 527s and other big-dollar funds that gained new power thanks to McCain-Feingold.

Groups like Fund for America - a 527 backed by George Soros - are training their efforts at sullying Mr. McCain's reformist reputation. MoveOn.org kicked it off with a mudslinging TV ad targeting McCain adviser Charlie Black's lobbying work. A Democratic 527 called Campaign Money Watch is also hitting him for perceived campaign-finance transgressions.

Mr. Obama also has a reformist reputation to worry about, but the newbie's bigger risk is that he'll have to purge his campaign of the wisdom it needs to run a national campaign, or even a White House transition. Plenty of candidates have, like Mr. Obama, pitched themselves as Washington "outsiders." But the successful always understood that they needed people behind the scenes with expertise and experience in national politics.

We should have learned from the whole campaign finance reform fiasco that there is no law we can write that would guarantee purity in election campaigns. And lest we forget, lobbying is guaranteed by the right of petition in the First Amendment. This taint by association with lobbying creates a dangerous precedent that will cut off experienced people from politics and contains the danger of spreading to other professions. We've practically established the pattern that anyone who has worked in the oil industry is now presumed to be corrupt and shouldn't work in government. What other professions will follow? Those who work for pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, bankers? Are we going to arrive at the point that the only people deemed pure enough to work in politics are those who have worked only for the government all their lives?

Betsy blogs daily at Betsy's Page