Mr. Soros goes at Washington

"He took on the Soviet system and he took on authoritarianism and totalitarianism in Latin America," says Malloch Brown. "If you know George, you know he is not one to get shy, or think a target is too big, or on too high a pedestal."

And, fans and foes alike say, Soros and his fellow big donors have certainly been effective. The surprise of the 2004 election cycle has been that the Democrats are as flush with cash as the Republicans. Soros was crucial in creating the early momentum and ultimately changing the equation: Today, of the 25 top donors to 527 committees, 22 gave money to Democratic-leaning causes, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

All this has helped Kerry in many ways. While the Democratic challengers were still out fighting for their party's nomination in the primary, the 527 groups were already in the battleground states building up "get out the vote" operations.

In August, while the Kerry campaign has chosen to "go dark" to conserve its resources for the last two months of the battle with Bush, the anti-Bush message has still been on TV screens in the battleground states, courtesy of Soros's 527s.

There have always been large donors, says Brigham Young's Patterson, but now, with the candidate prohibited from soliciting or directing the soft money, big donors are playing a larger role. People like Soros, he says, "are able to shape the kind of organizations they are involved in, and so shape the political debate."

Meanwhile, donors to 527s are being less carefully scrutinized, because the candidates are - again, in theory - less beholden to them. "But it's naive to think a candidate would not listen to the large individual donors of those groups at some point," says Patterson.

The Democrats, who originally celebrated their big-money donors with great fanfare, seem to be more aware of the potential pitfalls associated with the 527s and the billionaires funding them. Loath to lose their image as "party of the common man" yet none too keen on losing the big bucks in contributions, the leaders walk a tightrope: downplaying donors' contributions one moment, praising them the next.

"I believe in speaking out and fighting back, and we can't do that if we don't have people like Soros, who is willing to use his resources to help us organize," said Hillary Rodham Clinton in introducing Soros at the "Take Back America" conference in Washington in June. But, she continued, "no matter how much he contributes, he is one person. We must do our part."

Soros did not attend the Democratic convention in Boston last month. Kerry rarely mentions him, much less meets him - even though they have overlapped more than once in Sun Valley, Idaho, where they have neighboring homes. "I deliberately kept my distance, because of the nature of the 527s," Soros says of the convention.

"I am not supposed to coordinate with the party, and I also don't want to give the impression that I have gone overboard." The irony, he says, is that the Republicans are using him as something of a bogeyman to scare up more contributions. "I think I may have ended up raising more money for the Republicans," he says.

He stresses, however, that none of it is about him. "I'm no hero, I certainly have no ambitions to be a martyr," he says. The way he sees it, he says, is that he has the "privilege" to act on his principles, and that is what he is doing. He is fighting, he says, for an "open society" in the world's most transparent and voluble democracy.

"I have been successful and independent enough, so I can speak out. I feel it more or less incumbent on me when the occasion rises," he says. "This is the occasion. And I am speaking out."

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