In an early Democratic debate, Jerry Brown raised the issue of the corrupting influence of campaign contributions. An angry Bob Kerrey retorted, "Are you saying that I am bought and paid for?"

The sophisticated response might have been: "No -- and so much the worse for your campaign." Poorly financed, Mr. Kerrey was the first to drop out.

It is a simple fact that all the burning issues of the election -- free trade or protection, health insurance, income distribution, the future of U.S. production, the cities -- are critically important not only to voters, but to well-organized special interest groups and businesses. And that many such groups invest massively in candidates.

Remarkably, however, the armies of people who live by words have been unable to come up with more than catch phrases about money in politics. At best, they speak -- sometimes in awed tones -- of fund-raising totals.

For broaching the finance issue, Jerry Brown was ridiculed by Democratic party leaders, the other candidates, and the press. The networks, who have surely done more to lower public standards of taste in the last half century than any group this side of Las Vegas, and party leaders, who virtually without exception double as handsomely remunerated lobbyists, even claimed that a mere mention of Mr. Brown's 800 number for small donors during televised debates would demean the campaign.

Now, Bill Clinton, who has raised far more money than any other Democrat, and undoubtedly remains the overwhelming favorite of the business groups active in the party, has jumped far out in front of everyone else by running to the left of former Sen. Paul Tsongas, who called himself a "pro-business liberal."

On the Republican side, millions upon millions of dollars are flowing to both George Bush and Patrick Buchanan, although the electoral results suggest that literally no one ("uncommitted") can draw about a third of the Republican primary electorate in a race with the president, and that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unsubtly coded commercials attacking minorities, foreigners, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc., adds at best six or seven percent more to the total.

There is nothing very subtle about where most of this money -- which comes overwhelmingly in the form of contributions from individuals, not political action committees (PACs) -- is going.

The great bulk of American business, in particular, a vast cross section of America's multinational giants, is massed firmly behind one and only one candidate: President Bush.

Viewed systematically -- through, for example, an inventory of "early" (before the end of 1991) contributions by leading business figures that I undertook as part of the research for this essay -- the size of the president's advantage is breathtaking. Long before the primaries started almost a fifth of the sample had already contributed to the president's re-election campaign -- a truly remarkable rate, considering that far and away the most money piles up as the primaries actually get under way.

No one else is even close. Mr. Clinton, who clearly comes next in the affections of this group of major investors, trails far behind, while Mr. Buchanan barely shows.

This Golden Horde of Bush backers includes top executives in oil companies such as Exxon and Amoco; international banks (Chase, Chemical/Manufacturers Hanover, many investment houses (Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Nomura Securities) and a long list of firms in manufacturing, food and defense (IBM, General Electric, Rockwell, Motorola, and yes, Ford and even Lee Iacocca, who after the Japan debacle may want his money back) plus many utilities and service firms.

They appreciate the administration's many efforts in support of the global integration of markets for goods, capital and -- much more quietly -- people. When, for example, The Wall came tumbling down, and the administration made its historic decision to support a rapid reunification of Germany (with the understanding that the new economic giant would see to it that Europe would remain open to American firms and that NATO would continue to underpin the region's security), they applauded. As the administration sought to liberalize the Japanese economy -- particularly its financial markets, now the largest in the world -- at the cost of inviting and defending Japanese trade and investment in America, they sometimes grumbled, but mostly backed it.

More broadly, such firms are strong supporters of the effort to negotiate international agreements on trade and other subjects that shift to international agencies powers that have long been jealously guarded by individual governments, as in the administration's preferred version of a new GATT accord on trade liberalization. They have also stood behind the administration's long campaign to (re)open Latin America and other parts of the Third World to the multinationals, by making debt relief and other aid contingent on the establishment of private stock exchanges and new laws on foreign investment.

And though the collapse of the Soviet Union has led to strains, most of this bloc remains convinced that a powerful military force remains an indispensable adjunct to the emerging "new world order." In the Middle East, where the Gulf War consolidated American power, they have also tilted somewhat more heavily in favor the closer relations with conservative Arab regimes that continue to garner -- and invest -- the petrodollar surplus.

By comparison with this coalition's expansive global vision, its domestic policy preferences are less inspiring. Indeed, no great insight is required to see that the glaring imbalance between these two areas is the real root of the "vision thing," the problem that the president's critics keep harping on.

The growing dominance of the German mark in Europe now strongly constrains domestic American economic policy. The mark is a low-inflation currency. But in the long run, if the dollar is not to disappear as a vehicle for international trade and investment, the U.S. rate of inflation must closely parallel the mark's -- or investors will simply switch out. The result, in America, is a strong bias toward austerity at all times (plainly visible in the figures for gross national product growth under the Bush administration -- the weakest since the demobilization following World War II.)

Add to this the Bush bloc's broad commitment to laissez faire, its conviction that only the harsh realities of the world marketplace will force economic readjustment within the United States, and the realities of the deficit, and it is obvious that talk, which is cheap, is all the administration can usually afford for the cities, for education, for the poor or even for the middle class.

A glance at the Bush campaign's contributor list, however, also shows vividly that where pressures for action are building up, more than ideology promotes the status quo: there are mounds of contributions from top executives in the insurance industry, pharmaceuticals, private medical suppliers and doctors, and rivers of cash flowing into the campaign from the leading firms in the oil and chemical industries.

Thus George Bush, the candidate of multinational America.

Pat Buchanan's industrial base is a bit more complicated. Essentially, his campaign is a coalition -- very likely unstable -- of two distinct constituencies. The first is the protectionist part of the American textile industry, to which the notion of putting America First is as attractive in the nineties as it was in the thirties.

The second -- undoubtedly larger -- group, by contrast, might be termed not the "American First" but the "Me First" constituency. This consists of a broad array of conservative, very well heeled private investors and second tier figures in all sorts of industries, from finance to services. Dissatisfied with the caution that has increasingly come to mark the Bush administration, they appear to want two things above all: another big cut in capital gains taxes and still further cuts in spending, both foreign and domestic.

In sharp contrast to the former group, this faction has plenty of reasons to pitch in with the president in the fall campaign. In all probability, many have contributed to Mr. Buchanan in order to force the president to the right (with considerable success -- already the president has denounced his own budget agreement with the Congress and reintroduced proposals for capital gains cuts).

On the Democratic side, the most obvious and important development is the continued rightward drift of the whole spectrum of debate within the party: Both Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas positioned themselves firmly to the right of Michael Dukakis, and as many have noticed, the candidates have all addressed their campaign appeals to the middle class, as opposed to the poor, or even working people. Rarely do they speak of cities.

One reason for the dramatic change in climate is, of course, the fact that Jesse Jackson was successfully pressured into staying on the sidelines. But this scarcely accounts for the shift in the mainstream itself, which never embraced Mr. Jackson's agenda, but was quite happy to talk about "fairness" and cities.

Here is where an analysis of party finances is truly illuminating. In 1984 and 1988, one of the most obtrusive features of the Democratic Party's often very thin financial base was an outpouring of support from urban real estate interests and developers.

Centered mostly in the Northeast and Midwest and in a few other areas such as San Francisco and Atlanta -- areas heavily dependent on federal spending for infrastructure, "community development" and mass transit -- this constituency competed head-on with the military for scarce funds. Accordingly, it strongly supported center-left liberals who emphasized the "fairness" rhetoric and limits in military spending. (In my earlier statistical studies, this phenomenon often showed up very dramatically: Candidates who were strongly backed by real estate received disproportionately low rates of funds from aircraft producers, and vice versa.)

In 1992, however, Mr. Bush's rate of contributions from this sector is actually running ahead of the Democrats. Though a full analysis requires more data than is now available, it is not difficult to identify what has happened. The combination of the collapse of real estate values, the increasingly hopeless condition of many major cities and the 1986 Tax Act (which eliminated several important real estate tax breaks), along with the president's recent proposals to reinstate broad tax deductions for real estate losses, has led most of this group to sell out, take their losses, and reorient their business plans -- in many cases to urban development projects in Europe, which certainly changes their calculations of the cost and benefits of the American military.

Of all the candidates, Bob Kerrey's pattern of contributions from the sample of top business figures I analyzed most resembles that of Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis: knots of urban real estate magnates, investment bankers and financiers, a handful of oilmen, plus some Hollywood money. There just weren't enough of these types, however, to float a mild center-left campaign with a serious thrust on health care. Almost inevitably, the campaign collapsed, leaving behind a large debt.

Sen. Tom Harkin's campaign appears to have been another that suffered from the collapse of the real estate bloc within the party. Mr. Harkin instead usually confined himself to an inside game increasingly dependent on the official union movement, which has largely sat on its hands during the recession and is now widely unpopular with many of its most active members.

The PAC support that Mr. Tsongas initially complained about never amounted to much, with the result that Mr. Harkin had almost no money. (It cannot have helped that the first primary outside of his home state occurred in one of the most strongly anti-union states in the country.) Around the time he withdrew, 75 percent of the population were telling pollsters that they didn't know enough about him to have an opinion.

Running out of money, by contrast, was one problem that Bill Clinton never had to face.

A leader of the Democratic Leadership Council -- the Southern-oriented group whose efforts to move the party to the right have been enthusiastically supported by Northern businesses -- the Arkansas governor began the race with strong support from businesses in his own state, including Tyson Foods, Murphy Oil, Wal-Mart (where his wife sits on the board and whose owners, the Walton family, are almost all heavy contributors to his campaign), giant Beverly Enterprises, a large private provider of health care, and the investment banking, oil and gas interests associated with the Stephens family.

It may be sheer coincidence that back in 1976 the latter were also close to Jimmy Carter as he began his run for the White House. But the Clinton campaign's striking resemblance to the earlier Carter effort -- in which a moderately conservative free-trader from the South with some well-disciplined center-left humanitarian impulses runs from the periphery of America supported by internationally oriented investment bankers and their allies on Wall Street, in Washington and in the press -- is certainly not accidental.

In 1992, however, most of American business is far more conservative than it was in 1976. As a consequence, the Clinton candidacy is centered far more on investment bankers (and to some extent, communications companies and even retailers, whose biggest enterprises now bulk larger in the economy) than was Mr. Carter's.

Such interests -- virtually all of which now work closely with Japanese firms to help invest the fabled trade surplus -- differ only marginally from the internationalists at the core of the Bush coalition with regard to either foreign or domestic policy.

They virtually guarantee what is in any case obvious from a close study of the campaign's policy pronouncements, that a Clinton administration would not depart radically from the Bush's team's policies, particularly in regard to the critical questions of international trade and finance. At most, there would be more investment in "human capital" and some small programs targeting investment in civilian technology.

A Clinton administration is also likely to strike a different tone on race relations even as it declines to spend money on cities. It is also safe to say that it would also nominate different kinds of judges to all levels of the federal bench and take a slightly softer line than the Bush administration on the Israeli settlements.

What a Clinton administration almost certainly will not do, however, to put forward a sweeping health insurance reform. If anything is clear from the Federal Election Commission roster of contributors, it is that Mr. Clinton's lack of clarity about his plans for medical insurance is strategic. His reports are full of contributions from various parts of the medical-industrial complex, whose interest in blocking major reform is all too clear. Trial lawyers are also abundant, suggesting that a Clinton administration will not soon be tampering with the fabulously costly laws on liability or otherwise attempting to regulate expensive lawsuits (a cause the Bush administration is now taking up, both to strike a populist pose and to satisfy its insurance constituency).

Because Jerry Brown has a message, but no interesting money -- and remains in the race, long after most people thought he would be gone -- there remains only one campaign whose political economy still requires comment: that of Paul Tsongas.

If one wants a tag line for this effort, one could do worse than to sum it up as the Route 128 view of American politics. Both the campaign's definition of America's economic problem and the most controversial parts of its proposed solutions (along with much of its early money that wasn't raised from ethnic Greek businesses) originated from around the famous high technology highway outside of Boston.

Thomas Ferguson is professor of political science and senior fellow at the John W. McCormack Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A longer version of this analysis appeared in The Nation.