It's The Lying, It's The Favors

The John McCain/lobbyist story has officially jumped into a serious issue, at least in the eyes of the print media. While St. Maverick is certainly caught in a lie over his blanket denial of writing letters to the FCC on behalf of Paxson Communications, now there are questions over another FCC letter.

WASHINGTON — In late 1998, Senator John McCain sent an unusually blunt letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission, warning that he would try to overhaul the agency if it closed a broadcast ownership loophole.

The letter, and two later ones signed by Mr. McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, urged the commission to abandon plans to close a loophole vitally important to Glencairn Ltd., a client of Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist. The provision enabled one of the nation’s largest broadcasting companies, Sinclair, to use a marketing agreement with Glencairn, a far smaller broadcaster, to get around a restriction barring single ownership of two television stations in the same city.

Sinclair Broadcasting, as we know, is the right-wing media company that made "Stolen Honor," the documentary hit job on John Kerry in 2004. They broadcast it over all their television stations, and at the time John McCain lamented the documentary as a result of media consolidation. Yet here we have him writing letters to keep exactly that kind of media consolidation in place.

(He really should have gone further, by the way, since his military honor is going to come into question as the campaign goes on.)

Emptywheel has the definitive take on this story, and highlights this point:

For its part, Glencairn appeared to have been getting little support in Congress until it retained Ms. Iseman in 1998.

Edwin Edwards, who was the president of the company at the time, said in a recent interview that after retaining Ms. Iseman, he was able to get heard by Mr. McCain.

“We were pounding the pavement in Washington,” Mr. Edwards said. “We recruited help from as many people as we could. We knocked on every door just trying to get support.”

Iseman certainly had the ability to get McCain to do what was beneficial for her clients. The right can try to make this all about sex, but it's really gone well beyond that. This is about Maverick McReform-O-Straight Talk doing favors for corporate interests. All the time.

Not to mention that he's scamming the public financing system, reducing his credibility even further.

Republican Sen. John McCain might well ride out his standoff with federal regulators over his withdrawal from public financing for the primaries.

The contretemps, however, could haunt him in the general election.

The Federal Election Commission's decision to challenge McCain has forced the Arizona senator and likely Republican presidential nominee to defy the government's top campaign finance regulator in an area of law that McCain himself has helped seed with regulations.

His defiance, legally defensible or not, threatens to strip him of the moral high ground he needs to level the financial playing field for the general election.

McCain's defiance of the FEC, if rulings eventually go against him, carry JAIL TERMS of up to five years. Which of course he knows, since he WROTE THE LAW.

Then there are the confluence of interests between McCain, Iseman's lobbying firm, Carnival Cruise Lines (who leased ships to FEMA under a no-bid contract to house rescue workers in the Gulf Coast for a ridiculously overpriced sum), and Jeb Bush. That one's complicated, but if you're interested it's over here.

McCain has a real problem now, one that's going to carry all the way to November. His integrity is in serious question, and he's building a habit of lying to the press, which is breaking down the firewall he nromally holds, where the media won't report on him critically.

Expect many, many more of these stories.

Legs

Bud Paxson has now officially contradicted St. Maverick on his blanket statement that he never met with the broadcasting mogul, which of course was already contradicted by John McCain himself in a sworn deposition.

Broadcaster Lowell "Bud" Paxson today contradicted statements from Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign that the senator did not meet with Paxson or his lobbyist before sending two controversial letters to the Federal Communications Commission on Paxson's behalf.

Paxson said he talked with McCain in his Washington office several weeks before the Arizona Republican wrote the letters to the FCC urging a rapid decision on Paxson's quest to acquire a Pittsburgh television station.

Paxson also recalled that his lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, attended the meeting in McCain's office and that Iseman helped arrange the meeting. "Was Vicki there? Probably," Paxson said in an interview with The Washington Post today. "The woman was a professional. She was good. She could get us meetings."

Of course she could get meetings with John McCain. The man has a soft spot for lobbyists. And it's something when your alibi is "But I never show up for work!"

"Senator McCain was actively engaged in a presidential campaign in 1999-2000, and according to his calendar, the last day he conducted business in the Senate was November 8, 1999, and was frequently absent from the Senate prior to that date," the statement said.

"He returned to the Senate the night of November 19, 1999, for one hour to participate in a budget vote, and the Senate adjourned shortly thereafter on November 22, 1999. Between November 22, 1999 and Christmas, the Senator did not return to the Senate for any substantive meetings as he was involved in a national book tour and a presidential campaign."

Why should I be impressed that you were on a book tour instead of doing your job?

So now here's yet another drip of the faucet, with McCain absolutely caught in a lie, contradicted by everybody involved. And of course, the scenario of McCain doing favors for corporate interests who contributed to his campaigns and let him use the corporate jet is a wormhole into his long history of close involvement with lobbyists. Whatever he did with Iseman, she was certainly around the 2000 campaign, bragging about her access, and told to put and end to it (by named source John Weaver). McCain was holding fundraisers arranged by the lobbying firm aboard the yacht from a cruise line they represented (and he sponsored bills to deregulate the cruise line industry around that same time). And this isn't just a side issue from 2000, it's basically the same setup right now. He has more lobbyists raising money for him than any Presidential candidate. He has more lobbyists on staff than any Presidential candidate. And while he defended them in comments today, these aren't people who represent the poor or the environment or Constitutional rights. They're folks like Charlie Black, the guy who runs his lobbying shop out of the back of the Straight Talk Express bus (no lie).

Among the loudest McCain mouthpieces is Charlie Black, a seasoned Republican operative whose client roster dates back to such paragons as the late Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos and several African dictators, and more recently has featured Erik Prince, the mercenary entrepreneur who founded Blackwater. (Black's wife is a lobbyist too, and his firm, known as BKSH, is owned by Burson-Marsteller, the enormous P.R. conglomerate chaired by Hillary Clinton's top campaign advisor, Mark Penn.) McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, is also a lobbyist, whose client interests in the broadcasting and cable industry overlapped with those represented by Iseman and her firm, Alcalde & Fay. During the off years between presidential elections, Davis collected donations from companies regulated by the Senate Commerce Committee, chaired by his boss McCain, for the amusingly named "Reform Institute," which also paid handsome sinecures to Davis and various other McCain campaign consultants. McCain's chief fundraiser is Tom Loeffler, a prominent lobbyist and former Texas congressman whose clients range from PhRMA to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The print media is aggressively reporting this story, as the broadcast media tries to hold back the floodgates. The New York Times deserves some criticism for leading with the sex angle and going with sourcing that is a little thin. But all of these allegations about McCain's lobbyist ties have been out there for some time. They even got printed every so often, but always on the back pages of the paper. It took a bombshell to get most of the media to take notice. Now that they have, we can all see that the sex angle really doesn't have much to do with the fact that Mr. Reform, Mr. Straight Talk, Mr. Maverick, is actually just Mr. John McSame, another Republican crook who rewards those who reward him. And wait until they get to the defense contracts he's shoveled to constituents in Arizona.

It Gets Worse For McCain

It's not the sex, it's the lying.

A sworn deposition that Sen. John McCain gave in a lawsuit more than five years ago appears to contradict one part of a sweeping denial that his campaign issued this week to rebut a New York Times story about his ties to a Washington lobbyist.

On Wednesday night the Times published a story suggesting that McCain might have done legislative favors for the clients of the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, who worked for the firm of Alcalde & Fay. One example it cited were two letters McCain wrote in late 1999 demanding that the Federal Communications Commission act on a long-stalled bid by one of Iseman's clients, Florida-based Paxson Communications, to purchase a Pittsburgh television station.

Just hours after the Times's story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff--and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. "No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC," the campaign said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. "I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue," McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. "He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint."

While McCain said "I don't recall" if he ever directly spoke to the firm's lobbyist about the issue--an apparent reference to Iseman, though she is not named--"I'm sure I spoke to [Paxson]." McCain agreed that his letters on behalf of Paxson, a campaign contributor, could "possibly be an appearance of corruption"--even though McCain denied
doing anything improper.

Is PAX-TV even around anymore? Never mind, that's besides the point.

This is really, really bad for McCain. He's now contradicted himself in public. This is the kind of thing the media loves to hammer, and today's stories prove that this won't go away. What's more, the FEC is basically telling McCain that he cannot walk away from the public financing system.

The nation's top federal election official told Sen. John McCain yesterday that he cannot immediately withdraw from the presidential public financing system as he had requested, a decision that threatens to dramatically restrict his spending until the general election campaign begins in the fall.

The prospect of being financially hamstrung by the very fundraising system he helped create is the latest in a series of bitter challenges for the presumed GOP nominee, who still faces a fractured conservative coalition as he assumes the mantle of party leadership [...]

The implications of that could be dramatic. Last year, when McCain's campaign was starved for cash, he applied to join the financing system to gain access to millions of dollars in federal matching money. He was also permitted to use his FEC certification to bypass the time-consuming process of gathering signatures to get his name on the ballot in several states, including Ohio.

By signing up for matching money, McCain agreed to adhere to strict state-by-state spending limits and an overall limit on spending of $54 million for the primary season, which lasts until the party's nominating convention in September. The general election has a separate public financing arrangement.

But after McCain won a series of early contests and the campaign found its financial footing, his lawyer wrote to the FEC requesting to back out of the program -- which is permitted for candidates who have not yet received any federal money and who have not used the promise of federal funding as collateral for borrowing money.

The main reason McCain can't back out is that he received a loan using the public financing as collateral. But the most interesting part of this is that the FEC would have to vote to let McCain out of the public system. But they don't have a quorum right now, with the nomination of four members held up in the Senate because Bush won't withdraw the odious Hans von Spakovsky from the position. The other three would easily pass the Senate, but the Republicans have made it an all-or-nothing deal. Who led the fight on the Democratic side to keep von Spakovsky off the FEC? Barack Obama.

What would be hilarious would be McCain going to the White House, hat in hand, pleading with Bush to drop his demands and ditch von Spakovsky so that he can get off the public system that he built.

McCain can deny the sex part of this, and wage war with the New York Times, and get all the wingnuts behind him. But he's been caught in a web of lies, he has lobbyists populating his entire staff, a member of his leadership team just got indicted, his image as a reformer is being buried, and he might not have a dime to spend for the next SEVEN MONTHS.

Oof.

Howard Dean HAMMERS McCain on honesty and ethics

Right now we have two candidates in the middle of campaigning. They can't pay attention to the Republican opponent just yet. Someone needs to step in and fill the breach in the light of this brewing John McCain story. Unfortunately, the traditional media filled its rostrum with the usual wingnut welfare recipients and conservative standard bearers. No Democrat was brought on to discuss or describe the Iseman and Maverick scandal at all.

In case that ever changes, Howard Dean today, on the National Journal's radio show On the Air, offered the definitive template on how to handle this.

Q: So there is big news about John McCain -- the story that is in the New York Times, raising questions about his relationship with a lobbyist. This is a story the McCain people are saying is unfair and untrue. What do you think?

Dean: I have no idea whether the affair story is true or not, and I don't care. What I do care about is John McCain -- and this has been well-documented -- is talking all the time about being a reformer and a maverick, and in fact, he has taken thousands of dollars from corporations, ridden on their corporate jets, and then turned around and tried to do favors for them and get projects approved. He has tons of lobbyists on his staff. This is a guy who is very close to the lobbyist community, a guy who has been documented again and again by taking contributions and then doing favors for it. This is not a guy who is a reformer. This is a guy who has been in Washington for 25 years and wants to give us four more years of the same, and I don't think we need that.

First off, decouple the sex story (which is unsourced, lacking in merit and at this point a cheap shot) from the larger story. This is a scandal about a candidate who goes around with the patina of a reformer and a straight-talker, yet has spent 24 years inside Washington engaged in the same corrupt activities that have defined the Republican Party for a generation. Do that immediately. In the first sentence.

Second, connect the dots. The lobbyists on the staff (like his campaign manager), the lobbyists raising money for him, the corporate donations, the quid pro quo relationships, all of it needs to come out. Note that Dean doesn't get too far into the weeds, doesn't overwhelm with details, but he is extremely direct and clear and he never says "alleged." He says that the story on McCain is well-documented and it's sleazy.

Third, hit your opponent right at his strength. The Rove team attacked John Kerry on his national service. McCain uses his "straight talk express" image more than anything else. Go after that. Take him down. Because it's not like he has command of policy details to fall back on. He has 100 years in Iraq and that's it.

Let's look at some more of this interview:

Q: So are you saying that McCain, by virtue of what is spelled out in this story, has somehow suffered a hit in terms of his own legitimacy on the campaign finance and ethics issue?

Dean: Yes, he certainly has. This goes all the way back to the Keating Five Scandal and the S & L scandals, where he took a hundred thousand donations, rode on corporate jets and then intervened on Charles Keating's behalf -- and again and again we see this. We even saw -- it's so hypocritical -- we even saw that he is trying to harass Barack Obama about whether he's going to take public financing in the campaign, and he forewent his own public financing in the primaries after getting a loan, based on the idea that he might take public financing.

This is not a guy who is a reformer. He talks about change, and he makes a big deal about not being like Bush when in fact he is Bush. He voted for Bush's tax cuts after saying he didn't, and has been responsible for a $6 trillion national debt that our children are going to have to pay. He thinks we ought to stay in Iraq for 100 years. He thought it was great that the president vetoed health care for our kids under 18. This is four more years of George Bush, and I don't think the American people are going to buy it.

Now he's folding other elements of McCain's story - the Keating 5 scandal, the public financing double-dealing, the Iraq/100 years comment, the Bush tax cuts, S-CHIP - into this central critique of him being a phony, being more of the same we've seen from Republicans that has made us retch. This is so disciplined and on-message I can hardly even believe it. Dean managed to pack about 6 really good points into one or two paragraphs, and he wasn't overly detailed, he explained them succinctly and truthfully but never lost sight of the main point.

Q: Do you think that running against John McCain -- the Democratic Party -- that ethics is going to be an issue for him in this campaign?

Dean: Yes, because ethics is a huge issue anyway. People are tired of the incredible lack of ethics in the Bush Administration -- what we call the culture of corruption. I think they want somebody who is not going to do that any more, who is not going to mislead the American people -- whether it is on Iraq, or on lobbying or on taking public financing of campaigns, and who is not going to say one thing and do another.

Q: This whole matter, actually though, seems in a funny way to be helping Senator McCain, because the conservatives who were so skeptical about him now are rallying around him and saying he is a victim of the liberal New York Times. Isn't this a development that could actually wind up helping John McCain?

Dean: The conservatives are part of this culture of corruption that the Republicans have brought to Washington. Think of the Scooter Libby problem, the Alberto Gonzales problem, the Doug Feith problem. Think of all of the people in the Bush Administration that have had to leave office under a cloud -- Randy Cunningham, the Republican congressman.

Well, now it looks like John McCain is part of the corruption problem in Washington. He has done things that are legally questionable -- the Keating Five business back in the '90s -- but he doesn't seem to really have an ethical compass. He doesn't seem to have an instinct about what is the right thing to do and what isn't the right thing to do. He talks a good game, but he's just like all those Republicans in Washington have been for all these years, and I don't think the American people want a president like that.

Bush=McCain. That's what a lot of this was leading up to. McCain is running like somebody different, but he's really more of the same. And he's anything but a reformer; in fact he's caught up in the same culture of corruption that Abu Gonzales and the Duke-Stir and Doug Feith and Scooter Libby were caught up in.

"He doesn't really seem to have an ethical compass." That's the take-away.

This is maybe the best five-minute interview I've ever seen in my entire life. I think it's reasonably certain that... well, that no traditional media outlet is going to be booking Howard Dean to talk about this anytime soon. Because he's got McCain nailed. Dead to rights.
UPDATE: And the traditional media borrows the Dean narrative. A1 of the WaPo tomorrow.

Anti-Lobbyist Candidate Is Advised by Lobbyists

For years, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has railed against lobbyists and the influence of "special interests" in Washington, touting on his campaign Web site his fight against "the 'revolving door' by which lawmakers and other influential officials leave their posts and become lobbyists for the special interests they have aided."

But when McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JP Morgan and U.S. Airways.

Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O Lakes, the UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae.

That's like a kick to the throat. McCain is getting defined before our eyes.

Filthy Lucre

The McCain campaign is using the Iseman and Maverick story as a fundraising tool. Which is to be expected. But the optics are terrible. The fundraising appeal is attributed to John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis. He's a well-connected lobbyist trying to knock down a story about John McCain's relationship with a lobbyist.

-- Rick Davis arranged a cocktail meet and greet with McCain and a Russian businessman, Oleg Deripaska, so controversial that the US has revoked his visa -- at an economic conference in Switzerland. Davis' lobbying firm was trying to secure business with the Russian at the time, while the firm was already representing a competing political interest in Ukraine [...]

-- Mr. Davis, while working with the McCain 2008 campaign, also managed to procure a fat internet services contract from the campaign and kept lobbying for clients whose interests were opposed to McCain's own policy pronouncements.

Not only that, but there's a paragraph in the email that talks about how "objective observers" have dismissed the article as a smear job, and one of those "objective observers" they cite is... Bob Bennett, MCCAIN'S LAWYER in this case!

This is just sloppy pushback, and it doesn't add up.

A couple of things John McCain said at his press conference this morning didn't pass the smell test.

The first was when he said that the then-chairman of the FCC "said that was more than an appropriate" for McCain to have sent a letter to the Commission about a pending matter, one that involved a lobbying client of Vicki Iseman's. Paul Kiel tackles that one at TPMmuckraker.

The other comment from McCain that rang as false was when he said that he had not tried to get The Times to spike the story. He personally may not have, but his campaign staff certainly did, according to a number of reports, including the latest from The New Republic.

As a look at how the McCain camp responds in a crisis, well, it's a pretty good indicator. The right is rallying around them and trying to frame the story as "all about sex" and a spawn of the hated liberal machine as personified by the New York Times. Neither are true. But maybe he'll solidify the right but that was bound to happen. It's just a bloody shirt to wave so they can delude themselves into thinking that they don't have substantive disagreements with McCain. The point here, however, is that the bloom among independents, of this straight-talking maverick, is coming off the rose.

Jonathan Chait Plagiarized From Me

You all know that I came up with the Maverick and Iseman thing first.

Look at TNR's forthcoming article: Maverick vs. Iceman.

This is hilarious because I went to school with Chait and he once accused one of my friends of plagiarism because he wrote a newsletter with an events calendar that was... similar to an events calendar he wrote in the school newspaper.

Revenge is mine!

John Weaver Is Not Jane Doe

Apparently, the talking point that the broadcast media all settled on today is that the McCain/Vicki Iseman story is irresponsible because it's based entirely on unnamed sources.

Um, people?

The only on-the-record source the New York Times used in their John McCain story says he gave his quote to the paper in December and immediately shared it with the Arizona senator's top strategists.

John Weaver, formerly McCain's top strategist, tells Politico that after hearing repeatedly from Times reporters working on the story, he asked for written questions and then provided an e-mail response.

"They asked about the Union Station meeting and so I answered their questions," Weaver says. "I forwarded it to Steve, Charlie and Mark within minutes of sending it to the Times."

Steve Schmidt, Charlie Black and Mark Salter are all top advisers to McCain.

Weaver very simply said that Iseman was involved in the campaign and that could hurt McCain's image as a straight-talking reformer. This doesn't presume an intimate relationship, it presumes a relationship with a lobbyist. And this is a big problem.

Iseman was a telecommunications lobbyist, working for Pax Communications among other clients (including Sinclair Broadcasting, who aired "Stolen Honor", the anti-Kerry hit piece, in 2004. In the late 1990s McCain chaired the Senate Commerce Committee and Iseman had business before him:

In the years that McCain chaired the commerce committee, Iseman lobbied for Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, the head of what used to be Paxson Communications, now Ion Media Networks, and was involved in a successful lobbying campaign to persuade McCain and other members of Congress to send letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Paxson.

In late 1999, McCain wrote two letters to the FCC urging a vote on the sale to Paxson of a Pittsburgh television station. The sale had been highly contentious in Pittsburgh and involved a multipronged lobbying effort among the parties to the deal.

At the time he sent the first letter, McCain had flown on Paxson's corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events and had received $20,000 in campaign donations from Paxson and its law firm. The second letter came on Dec. 10, a day after the company's jet ferried him to a Florida fundraiser that was held aboard a yacht in West Palm Beach.

McCain has argued that the letters merely urged a decision and did not call for action on Paxson's behalf. But when the letters became public, William E. Kennard, chairman of the FCC at the time, denounced them as "highly unusual" coming from McCain, whose committee chairmanship gave him oversight of the agency.

Now, the McCain camp can deny this all he wants but there's a ton of smoke here, as well as an ON-THE-RECORD source basically confirming that Iseman's very presence at McCain events was a problem. And the floodgates ought to open once you recognize that McCain's campaign and professional life are crawling with lobbyists:

St. John McVain has a dirty little secret. The vaunted "maverick" Senator who works tirelessly against corruption and undue lobbyist interest in Washington?

Sham. He's been in bed with lobbyists for quite some time.

Why do I say that? Well, there's this: McCain's campaign staff had more lobbyists on it than any other back in June. And, after the staff massacre in July, the person he hired to be his new campaign manager (resurrecting his position from the failed 2000 campaign)? Uber-lobbyist Rick Davis. Who is Rick Davis? Try this on for starters:

"So now that very same Rick Davis will be taking over as campaign manager. Who is he? Fittingly for the most lobbyist-infested campaign in the race (on either side), Davis is yet another lobbyist. Davis founded Davis, Manafort & Freedman, Inc., through which he served clients ranging from Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha to “mafia-like” Argentine legislator Alberto Pierri. Davis has had a long association with McCain — one tangled up in webs of special influence. In 1999, while Davis was working for McCain, two of his firm’s clients, COMSAT and SBC, “had major (and controversial) mergers pending before the Federal Communications Commission in 1999, and both mergers were approved.” The FCC was under the legislative oversight authority of McCain’s Commerce Committee, yet McCain refused to recuse himself from the proceedings.

Davis was also a central figure in McCain’s Reform Institute scandal, an under-reported affair in which the “Maverick” Senator used a nonprofit, tax-exempt “reform” organization to trade political favors for corporate cash."

He had plenty of lobbyists on his campaign back in 2000, too. This is the real problem here, a huge dent to the Straight Talk Express' image. This is why Mitt Romney's throwing up repeatedly today.

Meanwhile, there's the story behind the story, covered in the New Republic today. There were months of wrangling behind the scenes at the New York Times, including McCain's lawyer Bob Bennett intervening to try and knock the whole thing down. The result was a piece that didn't completely mail anything down. It's a pretty interesting behind-the-scenes look, but it's not totally relevant. The right wing is trying to make this about the NYT, but Josh Marshall's take sounds right to me.

At the moment it seems to me that we have a story from the Times that reads like it's had most of the meat lawyered out of it. And a lot of miscellany and fluff has been packed in where the meat was. Still, if the Times sources are to be believed, the staff thought he was having an affair with Iseman and when confronted about it he in so many words conceded that he was (much of course hangs on 'behaving inappropriately' but then, doesn't it always?) and promised to shape up. And whatever the personal relationship it was a stem wound about a lobbying branch.

I find it very difficult to believe that the Times would have put their chin so far out on this story if they didn't know a lot more than they felt they could put in the article, at least on the first go. But in a decade of doing this, I've learned not to give any benefits of the doubt, even to the most esteemed institutions.

If they have more, they'll put it out; the cat's out of the bag now. But the focus ought to be on the fact that someone who claimed he's completely free of any of the usual corruption you'd expect from a guy who's spent 24 years in Washington is getting caught.

UPDATE: Ygz:

Basically, in exchange for money and freebies, McCain sought to intervene in a federal regulatory process in favor of a company that had provided him with tens of thousands of dollars in cash and services. He could try to plead naiveté, but in light of the hot water he got into with the Keating Five affair, which had the exactly same structure, he clearly knew what he was doing and knew that it was wrong. Now whether or not some guy gets to buy some TV station in Pittsburgh or not isn't a big deal as such, but it's an example of how dubious McCain's "straight talk" persona is. What's more, I think we can all agree that the subversion of the basic functioning of the federal government (see, e.g., US Attorneys scandal, FEMA, etc.) has been a major problem during the Bush years and we see here that McCain takes a Bush-like attitude to the integrity of these processes.

Yep.

McCain Has Issues Beyond Iseman

You know, before the whole Iseman and Maverick business, I was ready to note that John McCain's credentials on his signature issues, particularly national security and honesty, were beginning to come into question.

He put out a "no new taxes" pledge, and yet his health care plan seeks to "end the bias" toward employer-based health care by giving individuals a tax credit and treating employer-based benefits as taxable income. That would actually be a trillion-dollar tax increase, higher than any candidate has proposed this year. Empty words, useless platitudes.

He claims to be above reproach on the issue of torture, but after voting against banning torture in our intelligence agencies, he now has called on President Bush to veto the same intelligence authorization bill. Empty words, useless platitudes.

The supposedly reticent Obama campaign took McCain on directly on the issue of national security in a conference call.

Just got off a conference call with Susan Rice talking about the contrasts between her boy Barack Obama and John McCain on national security policy. One key point of emphasis was the strange notion coming from the McCain campaign that talking about focused counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan is irresponsible, whereas randomly threatening to start new wars is the height of good sense. As she put it "it's a strange contrast -- he says that somehow it's naive for a presidential candidate to outline how he would deal with that crucial national security challenge, but it's appropriate for him to joke about starting another war." A reporter from the Washington Times challenged her on the "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" business saying McCain was joking. Rice responds that "if he wants to say that he was joking and that's the kind of joke he thinks is funny, that's his perogative."

Even Joke Line is getting this message, that McCain looked soft on Al Qaeda by attacking Obama on targeted strikes in Pakistan, which is current US policy and has even yielded results. When Klein calls McCain a "loose cannon" on national security matters, that's not good for their camp.

Juan Cole also eviscerated McCain's tough talk on national security.

And I think there is good reason to ask whether McCain helped create al-Qaeda and the mess in Pakistan to begin with. It is time for someone to start holding the Cold Warriors who deployed a militant Muslim covert army against their leftist enemies accountable for the blow-back they created [...]

McCain appears never to have met a rightwing dictator he didn't like. McCain defends the dictator. Here is what McCain said about Musharraf late last December:

"Prior to Musharraf, Pakistan was a failed state," McCain said. "They had corrupt governments and they would rotate back and forth and there was corruption, and Musharraf basically restored order. So you're going to hear a lot of criticism about Musharraf that he hasn't done everything we wanted him to do, but he did agree to step down as head of the military and he did get the elections."

So in the building confrontation between democratic parties and the military dictator who trashed the rule of law, which would McCain support? What kind of relations will a president McCain have with the new prime minister of Pakistan if McCain is on record supporting the dictatorship that preceded?

The potted history McCain offers is wrong, and it points to the deep problems of authoritarianism and admiration for dictatorship in McCain's political philosophy. Pakistan was not a failed state before 1999, and in fact most of its political problems derived from repeated military coups such as the one spearheaded by Musharraf, as well as from the US government giving the Pakistani military gobs of money and enormous stockpiles of weapons, and winking at its nuclear program. In fact by "US government" above, we really could just substitute "Senator John McCain."

He goes on with some very damaging stories about McCain and the Taliban, as well as former Pakistani dictator General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq and the nuclear arsenal commenced on his watch. Our government is STILL making mistakes of this stripe, pressuring the new Pakistani government to retain Pervez Musharraf despite his thundering defeat in national elections, premised on the false belief that only a strongman can keep that country together (proven wrong by the election results).

Of course, this is all being swamped by the Iseman revelations, which the right and the broadcast media are pushing back against with all their might. Their myth of McCain as a straight-talking straight shooter is being threatened, and they must not let that happen. Of course, a few reality-based folks in the media see this for what it is:

"The press loves McCain. We're his base," MSNBC loudmouth Chris Matthews declared during the 2006 elections.

A new book, "Free Ride: John McCain and the Media" by David Brock and Paul Waldman, identifies Matthews as "the head of the McCain fan club among the establishment press" but says he has plenty of company [...]

Unending use of the phrase "maverick," and unceasing praise of McCain's "straight talk," have shaped a highly favorable public image ... at a time when ratings for his fellow members of Congress are in the drink [...]

Still, the national press corps' "big feet" owe it to the country to put aside their pack mentality and subject McCain to the same critical scrutiny as other presidential hopefuls.

A year ago, on "Hardball," Matthews asked about Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations: "What have you done to deserve this job?"

The program's guest allowed that this was a "tough question" facing the full field of candidates.

"Not so much for McCain," Matthews interrupted. "He has deserved the presidency. Whether he should be president or not, it's up to the voters."

It's a different standard.

Now this is a major challenge for that media trying to coat McCain with teflon. Since he may have to stay in the public financing system for the primary, and subsequently may have only $13 million to use between now and the Republican National Convention, McCain may have to rely on free media. They've been very reliable so far. But if this scandal goes drip-drip-drip, and particularly the corruption angle plays out, with news of favors for lobbyists, he's going to have an impossible time righting the ship.

UPDATE: By the way Matt Browner Hamlin has the most complete coverage of the Iseman story I've seen. I guess the media is pulling an "OH NOES NOT OUR MAVERICKZ!" on it.

Just So I'm The First To This Joke

This is a story about Iseman and Maverick.



(by the way, the McCain campaign's response is here. Also, he hired a lawyer late last year, Robert Bennett actually, the guy who defended Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky case, to knock down allegations that he "did favors for a D.C. lobbyist." Curiouser and curiouser.)

UPDATE: WaPo adds detail.

Concern about Iseman's presence around McCain at one point led to her being banned from his Senate office, according to sources close to McCain.

Either McCain's people are the most paranoid in the world, or there's some serious stuff underneath all of this. You don't ban someone from a Senate office for no reason, even if you are trying to uphold a squeaky-clean image.

UPDATE II: I think Yglesias has this right:

Does John McCain's campaign really want to go on record with the idea that he has "never done favors for special interests or lobbyists"? I would, personally, find it shocking if there were truly zero instances in the man's 25 year congressional career in which he did something for a special interest. What about Charles Keating? This seems like an invitation for trouble down the road.

The fact that telecom lobbyists with business in front of the Senate Committee he chaired were on the campaign plane and jetting around with him is really enough smoke on that one. McCain is a creature of Washington, and as such he's caught up in the whole ball of corruption. But he's a Villager in high standing, so I expect the media to try to take the bullet for him.

UPDATE III: I'm a damn prophet.

That's A Pitch In The Dirt

I'm frankly stunned by this article about John McCain and a female lobbyist.

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

First of all, this didn't come from a Democratic campaign. There's no chance that it did. It's way too early in the process. It's far more likely that this came from a Republican oppo research shop; not necessarily Huckabee or Romney's, but perhaps one of the American Conservative Union sleaze-meisters or any number or enemies he had on the right. Let's get that straight. The rumors were out there on this for a while, apparently, in fact McCain himself denied it in December.

The Internet right is going to rally around McCain now. This came from the New York Times, which is seen as the devil incarnate for conservatives. They're going to hit back and hit back hard. But there will be a residual effect out there. The story is now out there. It's out there among the social conservatives that already have questions about McCain. Rush will use this to unite folks around McCain.

And, it hits McCain at his strength. He's supposed to walk on water and have the highest integrity. Now these allegations are with a lobbyist. The lobbyist argued in front of McCain's committee. He flew all over the country on corporate jets of media moguls when he was on the Commerce Committee. This punctures the bubble of honor around McCain. This will have an impact.

I think McCain is still absolutely the nominee. Ultimately men with power use that power to get what they want and I think everyone's eyes are pretty wide open on that fact. What matters is how you govern and what policies you support. This doesn't change my opinion of McCain; it wasn't all that high to begin with. But it does have the potential of being an under-the-radar erosion of his support.

Because I couldn't fucking stand what the Republicans did to the Clintons in the 1990s, that's all I've got on this matter barring a major change in the story.

UPDATE: OK, just this. The story is actually about double-talk from McCain about his own work on campaign finance reform and Congressional ethics. I mean, McCain's campaign is run by a lobbyist, and so is his Senate office. This is a story that needs to be told. But most people won't get past the headline.