By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff

When candidate Barack Obama decided last year that he was so flush with donations that he would spurn public financing for both the nomination and general election campaigns, he worried many of those who were trying to reduce the influence of big money on elections. Obama seemed to reassure them, though, by promising that if he became president he would push to fix the system.

By naming labor lawyer John Sullivan to the Federal Election Commission this month, however, Obama’s got the advocates of tough campaign finance enforcement fretting again.

“The gusto with which Mr. Sullivan has bashed important elements” of the 2002 campaign finance law “and repeatedly taken radical deregulatory positions does not inspire confidence,” says J. Gerald Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center in Washington.

Even with Obama in the White House and Democrats — usually more supportive of campaign finance restrictions than Republicans — in control of Congress, Hebert is worried about the drift of things. Last fall the Republican National Committee filed court challenges to the bans on unlimited contributions to political parties and on coordinated expenditures between parties and campaigns. “Their enthusiasm is based on the current composition at the Supreme Court,” says Hebert. Because of the two justices chosen by George W. Bush , “we know there are five justices that are skeptical of the campaign finance regulations.”

Recent FEC decisions have been lenient in their enforcement of campaign finance rules, says Amanda Adams, a policy analyst at the watchdog group OMB Watch, largely because the commission has drawn a vague boundary between advocacy on an issue, which is allowed for many groups not subject to finance limits, and advocacy for a particular candidate. “The way it’s set up they decide on a case by case basis, and so that leaves open a lot of questions” for groups that want to engage in issue advocacy, Adams says.

Sullivan has been associate general counsel of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and as such he’s questioned the need for disclosure rules on advertisements aimed at influencing voters. His stance, Hebert contends, was “so radical that not even the most visible, well-known opponents of campaign finance restrictions supported it.”

In 2006, Sullivan filed comments with the FEC questioning rules on coordinated communications between candidates and outside groups, such as unions.

Some critics of the 2002 campaign finance law, in fact, seem more enthused about Sullivan’s appointment. “Sullivan’s litigation on behalf of the SEIU and other organizations makes us optimistic that he understands how campaign finance restrictions” in the law “threaten Americans’ political free speech rights,” says Bradley A. Smith, a former FEC commissioner who founded the Center for Competitive Politics to try to lift restrictions on campaign finance.

The White House, meanwhile, thinks criticism of Sullivan is ill-founded.

“He has devoted his professional life to understanding the mechanics of voting and ensuring that elections are free, fair and open,” says spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield. And one group that advocates public financing of elections, Public Campaign, praised the appointment earlier this month, noting that Sullivan had pushed the SEIU to endorse public financing.