The Return Of Malachi

It's one thing for disgraced Jack Abramoff buddy Ralph Reed to resurface at all in a Presidential election. It's another thing for him to headline a fundraiser for the Republican nominee. It's quite another for that nominee to be John McCain, who as chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee investigated Reed and Abramoff's bilking of tribes out of millions of dollars through fake Indian gaming ballot initiatives.

McCain's campaign said Tuesday that Reed has no official role in the presidential campaign. But that didn't stop Democrats from castigating Reed's participation in Monday's fund-raiser at the Marriott Marquis.

"John McCain's decision to cozy up to one of the central figures in the Republican culture of corruption shows how far he is willing to go to win," said Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. "Despite all of his rhetoric about reform, McCain's willingness to accept money raised by tainted Abramoff cronies like Ralph Reed shows that McCain simply cannot be trusted to bring change to Washington politics."

The Georgia Democratic Party was even more blunt. "John McCain says he takes the high road, and then he comes to Atlanta and chows down on shrimp cocktail with an unindicted co-conspirator," party spokesman Martin Matheny said.

Reed is tied into all the disgraceful scandals of the Abramoff years, from the Indian gaming deals to forced slavery and sexual assault on the Marianas Islands:

In August 1999, political organizer Ralph Reed's firm sent out a mailer to Alabama conservative Christians asking them to call then-Rep. Bob Riley (R-Ala.) and tell him to vote against legislation that would have made the U.S. commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands subject to federal wage and worker safety laws....

"The radical left, the Big Labor Union Bosses, and Bill Clinton want to pass a law preventing Chinese from coming to work on the Marianas Islands," the mailer from Reed's firm said. The Chinese workers, it added, "are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ" while on the islands, and many "are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand."

A year earlier, the Department of the Interior -- which oversees federal policy toward the U.S. territory -- presented a very different picture of life for Chinese workers on the islands. An Interior report found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.

This is sad, but typical of a campaign fueled by lobbyist money and weighed down with multiple ties to Abramoff.

When Senator John McCain led a Senate investigation three years ago of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who later pleaded guilty to fraud charges, Mr. Abramoff’s old firm turned to a former McCain campaign adviser for help.

The firm, Greenberg Traurig, which had quickly cut its ties to Mr. Abramoff, hired Randy Scheunemann, who had been the McCain campaign’s foreign policy adviser in 2000 — and is again this year — for advice on handling the Senate investigation.

“After Greenberg Traurig severed ties to Mr. Abramoff, Mr. Scheunemann advised the law firm on how best to cooperate with the Senate investigation,” said Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign. “The record reflects that the law firm cooperated.”

(by the way, McCain basically let Abramoff off with a warning in his part of the investigation. He also never called his good buddy Reed to testify.)

My Congressman Henry Waxman today called on McCain to return any money Reed aided in raising for him. Waxman also noted this:

One reporter asked Waxman about the tens of thousands of documents McCain assembled in the course of his investigation but refuses to release to the public.

Waxman told us that John McCain has documents that even the House Oversight Committee couldn't get.

The House Abramoff probe also has a tie-in to the missing email scandal. Waxman's committee found that Abramoff was exchanging a lot of email with White House staffers, and not just through government accounts (as required by law).

In fact, the subpoenaed emails were the first indication that White House officials were doing public business over private email accounts, Waxman explained.

This is a complete racket. I'm glad that the Obama campaign is hammering McCain over his lobbyist ties, but the Abramoff-Reed nexus is the big kahuna. They should go deeper.

The McCain Trainwreck

I think that the relentless negativity and cynical tactics are catching up with John McCain. Their strategy to paint Obama as "the other" and also to subtly push the racial message is drawing condemnation from all sides. Even Jake Tapper is counting all the white women praising Obama in his latest dogwhistle Web ad. The attacks are coming up short and leaving people discouraged about how this man with 26 years in the Congress has nothing to say about his own record.

Other veterans, such as James Jewett and Jay Johnson of Texas, expressed misgivings about McCain using the occasion to attack his opponent so fiercely.

Duke Hendershot, a double amputee retired Marine who served in Vietnam, supported McCain’s run for president in 2000 but is undecided this year.

“John just isn’t the same as he used to be. He’s not his own man,” said Hendershot, who lives in San Antonio, Texas. “A lot of that has to do with how he’s wanted this job so bad for so long that he’s tied himself to President Bush.”

And the negative tone is inviting other attacks. Many are honing in on all the lobbyist ties inside the campaign. But more than just convenient attack ad fodder, these have real consequences. McCain championed stronger regulatory oversight for the tobacco industry for almost ten years, and this year he changed his position on his own bill.

The campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) is declining to embrace McCain’s own 1998 tobacco bill, legislation that would have raised taxes to the tune of $516 billion over 25 years. … Asked repeatedly last week whether McCain still backs the bill and if he thought it was a good idea, senior adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin declined to answer directly.

But he noted that some of the aims of the legislation did not pan out as hoped for after the tobacco industry and the states settled on their own. … And McCain today does not support raising taxes on cigarettes, his adviser said.

Hosting fundraisers with the likes of Ralph Reed, he of the ties to convicted felon Jack Abramoff, is also crushing the maverick brand.

And if this article about the real McCain ever got traction, voters would view him in a whole new light. There's a wealth of new information in here, about his relationship to Charles Keating, his hypocrisy on campaign finance reform and earmarks, but most damning is his cruelty:

In the spring of 1988, things were a mess. Governor Evan Mecham had just been impeached, and everyone was busy licking wounds [...]

In Arizona, when a governor leaves office early, the secretary of state ascends. In this case, that was Rose Mofford, an old-school Democrat from the small mining town of Globe, a lady with a bright white beehive that Arizona Republic cartoonist Steve Benson once famously drew as a cone-full of Dairy Queen.

Mofford had served as secretary of state for decades. She'd never aspired to the state's top spot. But she accepted graciously and agreed to serve out the remaining 2 1/2 years of Mecham's term. She never showed interest in running for another term after that, although she was enormously popular.

As the story goes, John McCain and his friends wanted her out immediately. And, they figured, they had the mechanism in place to do it. Mecham was gone, but the recall effort was still in place. Why not shift gears and target Mofford instead?

The Democrats didn't like that one bit and asked the Arizona Supreme Court to consider the legality.

In mid-April 1988, Mofford and some staff flew to Washington for, as one former aide puts it, the "perfunctory wet kiss" meeting with the Arizona congressional delegation. Even in mean old D.C., there's such a thing as protocol, and the tour was expected to go along without incident.

At 10 in the morning on April 12, Mofford testified before the Senate Energy and Water Development Subcommittee on Appropriations on the topic of the Central Arizona Project.

Now, Mofford had been governor for only eight days. Before that, her main task had been running the state's elections department. This appearance (there was a similar one, later that day, before the House) had been billed as ceremonial. She was not familiar with the particulars of federal water law. Nor did her staff think she'd be expected to be — just then.

But, apparently, Senator James McClure, a Republican from Idaho, did. After a lot of looking, that librarian and I (actually, it took three librarians) tracked down the testimony from that day. McClure asked Mofford a series of questions that would leave any water expert's mouth dry. Her staff jumped in to try to answer, but even so, ultimately they had to file an addendum to the testimony.

Word spread quickly about what had happened [...]

"During lunch, McCain said, almost with mischievous glee, that he had slipped some highly technical questions to [James McClure] to ask Mofford — questions she wouldn't be prepared to answer or expected to answer.

"Flabbergasted, I asked McCain why would he want to sabotage Mofford's testimony, when in fact the CAP was the nonpartisan pet of Republicans and Democrats — such as far-left Udall and far-right Goldwater — since its inception.

"His reply, as near as I remember, was, 'I'll embarrass a Democrat any time I get the chance.'

I'm not convinced this all plays nationally - the lobbyist love, the nastiness, the outbursts, the hypocrisy, the campaign of hate and not hope - but there's a cumulative effect. In the end, I believe voters will reject it if they know the facts.