But at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee investigation will officially turn out the lights. Filing cabinets are being cleared out. The sleuths are moving on to less attention-getting pursuits. And the evidence is being summarized into two voluminous reports, one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats.

After 32 days of hearings, 418 subpoenas, 196 depositions and 70-plus testifying witnesses, nobody has gone to jail as a result of the Senate's multimillion-dollar inquiry into fund-raising improprieties during recent campaigns, no laws have been changed and no public outcry has surfaced.

"It certainly wasn't a blockbuster set of hearings," said Thomas Mann, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington who testified before the committee as an expert on campaign finance reform. But, Mann said, "The jury is still out" on the impact of the hearings, given that criminal prosecutions are still possible and campaign-finance reform legislation will again be pushed in Congress in 1998.