THERE seems to be no end to it. The overnight stays in the Lincoln bedroom, the 98 coffees, the phone calls for money from the White House, the Asian connection, the Chinese involvement, the FBI, the drug smuggler, the gun runner. Even the honourable Mr Tony Lake fell victim to the fall out and lost the top CIA job.

President Clinton may haven swept back into the White House but in his wake has come a string of fundraising abuses which has shocked a cynical Washington which had thought it had seen it all before.

It is such a complicated tale it may never be unravelled. Two Congressional committees are poring over hundreds of thousands of pages from the confidential files of the White House and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The Department of Justice and FBI are doing their own investigations.

For the President's Republican opponents, it means subjecting him and his administration to a slow drip Chinese torture as tit bits are leaked almost daily from the investigating committees.

For the President, there is increasing frustration as the media fascination with the latest revelations overshadows his bridge building efforts to the 21st century through educational and social reforms.

The President hopes that it is a storm that will pass as his enemies come to realise that what seems a huge political scandal in Washington has the rest of the country unsure of what all the fuss is about. The Democrats were only doing what the Republicans have always done - raised millions and millions of dollars to win an election.

Opinion polls show that so far the fundraising revelations have barely affected the high level of approval for how President Clinton is doing his job. On the fundraising schemes, only 12 per cent believe he did something illegal, but 53 per cent believe he did something unethical.

It is the Vice President, Mr Al Gore, who may yet suffer more political damage as the positions himself for the presidential election in 2000. Mr Gore has had to pledge he will make no more fundraising calls from the White House while insisting that he did nothing wrong when he made about 50 during the last campaign.

It is not surprising that many people are turned off by the whole business, even if hothouse Washington can't get enough of it. The rules governing fundraising are bewildering.

Following the Watergate scandal in 1972, which forced President Nixon to resign two years later, the rules for raising campaign funds were tightened. Contributions to presidential candidates for their campaigns were strictly controlled by a federal commission.

However, a huge loophole has opened up in the form of uncontrolled "soft money" to the political party committees. Corporations and unions which cannot contribute directly to a campaign can use the "soft money" option to support a candidate indirectly, as can wealthy individuals.

THERE are virtually no rules about "soft money" and all the rumpus about the White House being used or abused to raise money for the re election of Mr Clinton and Mr Gore is irrelevant from a legal point of view, whatever about ethics.

The fiction is that this money went to the DNC only to promote "issues", advertising and register voters, but the reality was that the TV campaigns clearly supported the Clinton Gore ticket and rubbished their opponents, even it they did not use the forbidden words: "Vote for..."

The saline thing happened on the Republican side, where the "soft money" paid for TV ads which said how patriotic Mr Bob Dole was and what a deceiver President Clinton was. No votes were solicited, of course.

The difference was that the Democrats could not refrain from exploiting the attractions of the White House which, as the executive arm of government, is supposed to keep aloof from party politics, however difficult this may be. And President Clinton enthusiastically joined in the wooing of the fat cats at White House functions, although he once complained to an aide: "I can't think, I can't act, I can't do anything but go to fundraisers and shake hands."

He justified this recently, saying: "We are proud of the fact that, within the limits of the law, we worked hard to raise money so that we could get our message out there and we would not be buried - literally be buried - by the amount of money that the other side had at their disposal."

Some critics now jeer at this argument, pointing to how easily the President disposed of the DoleKemp challenge, money or no money.

The big push for fundraising began after the disastrous 1994 midterm election, when the Republicans won control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. President Clinton was being written off as a one term former southern governor like Jimmy Carter.

Once launched, the Democratic fundraising became frenetic as the pressure came on for the millions of dollars needed for TV ads which demonised the Republicans as the saboteurs of the health and pension schemes for the retired. The Republicans never recovered from this onslaught.

The wealthy Asian community was eagerly tapped for money. The lax rules were bent so much that the DNC is now returning $3 million in illegal or dubious contributions. One of the most serious questions the President has to answer is if there were any favours given in return for the large donations by White House visitors.

If this could be proved he would face impeachment. However, he has strongly denied any connection between donations and changes in policy, such as allowing China most favoured" nation trading status regardless of its human rights record. There have been other cases of large donations following decisions which helped certain companies but no evidence of cause and effect.

The recent charges of interference by the Chinese government in last year's elections based on intelligence intercepts caught the Clinton administration by surprise. The Chinese authorities have strongly denied the charges.

While the FBI warned a number of senators last summer to be wary of campaign contributions which could have a Chinese connection, this information never reached the President or his senior advisers in the National Security Council.

Mr Tony Lake, who headed the NSC, has now lost his chance to head the CIA because subordinates did not brief him on this and other dubious attempts by foreigners to gain access to the President in return for contributions.

PRESIDENT Clinton is now loudly calling for a radical reform of the campaign financing system through legislation. He has proposed a ban on"soft money" and accepting funds from foreigners who have no vote.

The Republicans, who get larger contributions from their supporters through "soft money", are unwilling to accept these restrictions. First they want the Attorney General, Ms Janet Reno, to appoint an independent counsel or special prosecutor to investigate if there were criminal offences involved in the fund raising efforts of the President and his senior aides.

This would be a humiliating exercise for the President, who would have to give sworn testimony to a grand jury. So far, Ms Reno has refused to bow to pressure from the Republicans and the liberal media who normally support the President to appoint a special prosecutor.

It looks as if the fundraising issue is going to haunt the President and the Vice President for a long time to come.