From Today's Washington Post -- The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists By Michael D. Shear and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, February 22, 2008; A01 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, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways. Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O' Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae. McCain's relationship with lobbyists became an issue this week after it was reported that his aides asked Vicki Iseman, a telecom lobbyist, to distance herself from his 2000 presidential campaign because it would threaten McCain's reputation for independence. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/21/AR2008022101131_pf.html The Straight Talk Express train wreck
I'm surprised his campaign advisors didn't have him be more honest about at least the one lobbyist "friend." I just mean admitting that yes, he recalls his handlers telling him to keep his distance, etc. The denials send reporters into a frenzy.
from josh -- Not Looking Good Maybe they'd prefer to go back to the affair story? When John McCain went before the press on Wednesday to deny having an affair with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, he also made a series of categorical denials about the non-sex, influence peddling part of the story. Only many or most of those claims now appear to be demonstrably false. McCain said and his office later released a statement claiming that McCain hadn't met with anyone from either Paxson Communications (the broadcaster wanting the favors) or Alcalde & Fay (the lobby shop trying to get them the favors). Today, though, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff dug up a 2002 deposition in which McCain said that he had discussed the issue directly with Lowell Paxson, the head of Paxson Communications. Now the Post has asked Paxson himself, now retired, and he says, Yep, I met with McCain and asked him to write the letters. And he thinks he remembers Iseman being in the meeting too. --Josh Marshall http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
What nobody has done is to analyze McCain's voting record in relation to legislation involving any of his lobbyist friends. If his vote was not consistently influenced, then there is no impropriety. Instead, the reporters run with "OMG...a guy who has been in Washington forever and a day has friends!!!!...and OMG...they're lobbyists!!!!"
Not my problem if republicans are so embarrassed by their candidate they don't want to discuss him. Better to start threads calling Obama a crack head f*****.
Another article in today's WaPo -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/22/AR2008022202634.html?hpid=topnews Broadcaster Lowell "Bud" Paxson yesterday 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 in 1999 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, likely 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 yesterday. "The woman was a professional. She was good. She could get us meetings." The recollection of the now-retired Paxson conflicted with the account provided by the McCain campaign about the two letters at the center of a controversy about the senator's ties to Iseman, a partner at the lobbying firm of Alcalde & Fay.
To be fair, he did turn it into more of a story with his factually incorrect denial. Like you said - I'd like an analysis of the actual votes, but at least in the case of this one FCC letter, it does appear that he sent it directly by request of one of his lobbyist friends. I don't particularly think that's a big deal, but it does make it harder for him to argue that he's not at all influenced by lobbyists.
When you've been in the Senate for 86 years you're bound to have lobbyists up to your neck and running out of your ears.
If you don't think that all sitting Congressmen and Senators are affected by those who contribute to their campaigns handsomely, then you are either naive or fooling yourself. Oh and to mc mark....we get it. You don't like John McCain. Point made. The horse is dead...you can stop kicking any time.
No doubt. This is mostly a non-story to me. I'm mostly getting out of this watching McCain respond to srutiny, but the facts themselves, in this case, won't affect my vote.
I don't know...I'd love to see McCain not-be-president on Jan 21 09, but I am not sure all this stuff is massively important. I understand the kernels of importance in terms of his connections with lobbyists vs. his rhetoric about uncorrupted government, but i dont think his lobbyist ties are the election's substantive issue. I think it should be reported, I don't think it is a hatchet job, but I do think it hard to thrive in Washington without some dealings with these people. I think it is hard to retrospectively unearth every meeting and motive from the past 30 years and make a three dimensional judgment on the candidate. Obama and McCain both speak very articulately on this topic in their respective books; i admittedly have not read all of McCains book. But I think his record - demonstrated record - of trying to make systemic change (McCain Feingold) and articulate the problems is a massive plus, especially when his party seems totally uninterested in it. He is clearly articulate about it. I can see the 'walk the walk' angle, but in the scheme of things, I tend to not go crazy about this with McCain, i think he has shown major balls on this, regardless of either parties' typical behavior.
Respectfuly, those sound like two vastly opposed positions, but they come from you on back to back posts. Would you care to clarify?
it's so sad how basso and trader jorge smear obama and then mc mark is now smearing mccain over equally trivial stuff. sucks.
Trivial? I wouldn't say that. Anyway, here's an interesting response from the Times to criticism of the article about McCain... I think we all expected the reaction to be intense. We knew from our experience last year, when word leaked out we were pursuing this story, that Senator McCain's operatives would set out to change the subject by making the story about The New York Times rather than about their candidate. That's a time-honored tactic for dealing with potentially damaging news stories. We knew some readers would disagree with our decision to publish this information. After all, we wrestled with our own doubts on that score. We anticipated that it would provoke at least a brief media firestorm — and that our efforts to put Mr. McCain's relationship with a lobbyist in a bigger context would probably get lost in the retelling. Personally, I was surprised by the volume of the reaction (including more than 2,400 reader comments posted on our Web site). I was surprised by how lopsided the opinion was against our decision, with readers who described themselves as independents and Democrats joining Republicans in defending Mr. McCain from what they saw as a cheap shot. And, frankly, I was a little surprised by how few readers saw what was, to us, the larger point of the story. Perhaps here, at the outset of this conversation, is a good point to state as clearly as possible our purpose in publishing. For a year or so, in addition to pieces on issues, candidate interviews, investigations of their business dealings, polling and reporting from the campaign trail, we have been running this series called "The Long Run." It is a kind of serial biography of the candidates. We pick key events or themes or questions about a candidate's life that reflect on his or her character and qualifications. (They are all archived here.) These profiles aim to include a mixture of new material and previously known material looked at fresh. Previous installments on Senator McCain have dealt with his family and with his bare-knuckle primary battle against George Bush in South Carolina in 2000. Perhaps the defining narrative of Senator McCain's career is his long, determined recovery from scandal. Elected to public office as a national hero, the senator was tainted by revelations that he had done favors for an unsavory banker he considered a friend. It was — as he describes it in his memoirs — a searing humiliation from which he never recovered. He rebuilt his career and his reputation by becoming a champion of clean government, a critic of lobbyists and the vested-interest money that courses through American politics. More than most politicians, he was keenly aware that, as he put it in one of his books, "questions of honor are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics." The point of this "Long Run" installment was that, according to people who know him well, this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation. The story cites several examples, and quotes friends and admirers talking of this apparent contradiction in his character. That is why some members of his staff were so alarmed by the appearance of his relationship with Ms. Iseman. And that, it seemed (and still seems) to us, was something our readers would want to know about a man who aspires to be president. Clearly, many of you did not agree. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/b...all&adxnnlx=1203796899-qo4knPQY2/eGEkuJivAuiw Impeach Bush.
It's a shame that the publicity about the article tends to overlook that part. One of the problems of a story becoming the story, if you know what I mean. Impeach Bush.
