As John McCain has gone through a series of ideological shifts, so too has his approach to lobbyists. For years, McCain dealt with lobbyists the same way most lawmakers do: taking their money and offering them influence. After McCain’s role in the Keating Five scandal, for which he was admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee, McCain adopted the role of a “reformer,” who railed against the undue access given to lobbyists.
For the 2008 presidential campaign, McCain switched again, embracing lobbyists and hiring a legion of lobbyists to run his entire campaign operation. Now, after a series of controversies and fired aides, lobbyists are looking at the McCain team and asking, “This is the thanks we get?”
It was a small band of loyal lobbyists who stood by presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain last August when his campaign went broke and his White House aspirations seemed doomed.
They raised money for him under impossible odds and kept him company in budget hotels during his darkest days.
Now they are under siege as McCain purges active lobbyists from his campaign team in a quest to wrest the reformist title from Democrat Barack Obama, his likely opponent in this fall’s general election.
Five lobbyists were shown the door in eight days, which didn’t help on K Street. “If it was OK to have these people working for you in February, why is it not OK today?” asked one Republican lobbyist.
Another added, “McCain’s self-righteous [expletive] has caught up with him. Now he’s got himself in a jam.”
Yet another said, “I find it a little offensive. It was good enough to get my $2,300 donation. If we’re not good enough, then send my check back. It pisses me off.”
It’s true; the McCain gang just walked into this one. They never vetted aides, they never thought to check client lists, and then when confronted, they started purging lobbyists-turned-aides without thinking about the implications. Now, no one’s happy.
Worse, it leads to even more embarrassing stories like this one from Sam Stein.
The McCain camp has insisted that the resignations are nothing more than evidence of the Senator’s sincerity in combating outside influences. But the truth, reform groups say, is far from adulatory: McCain’s current policy hardly compares to the ethical commitments he championed earlier in his career.
Indeed, just twelve years ago, when McCain was politically recuperating from his involvement in the Keating Five scandal, the Senator introduced legislation that would, if implemented today, cripple to his current campaign. In March 1996, McCain took to the Senate floor to offer a bill that, in his own words, “would ban a candidate or a candidate’s authorized committee from paying registered lobbyists.”
In order to root out the moneyed influences, McCain continued, Congress had to unequivocally cut off the flow of campaign cash.
“Registered lobbyists who work for campaigns as fundraisers clearly represent a conflict of interest,” he added. “When a campaign employs an individual who also lobbies that Member, the perception of undue and unfair influence is raised.”
The legislation, introduced twice, never passed.
It’s a good thing McCain isn’t a more effective lawmaker — his own bill would have made it impossible for his own campaign to function.
Also keep in mind, five lobbyists are gone, and two more (Rick Davis and Charlie Black) are under fire, but the list keeps growing.
This past month, Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign paid tens of thousands of dollars to a vendor that was simultaneously working on behalf of an independent group attacking Sen. Barack Obama.
The $47,000 paid to the company Campaign Solutions for web services, on the surface, seems benign. But the expenditure brushes against the campaign’s newly implemented policy which states: “No McCain campaign vendor may work with a 527 or independent group without a pre-approved legal ‘firewall.'”
Campaign Solutions, records show, also provides web services to Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group headed by David Bossie and founded by Floyd Brown, famed Republican dirty tricksters. The website for Citizens United features a bevy of sharp attacks on Obama — sample: “BARACK OBAMA – THE CHOICE OF TERRORISTS” — and solicits donations for an anti-Obama documentary film.
In addition, Brown runs the website ExposeObama.com, which was founded in March 2008 and describes itself as a “group of conservatives concerned that Barack Hussein Obama would be the worst possible President for America at this time, or any time.” ExposeObama.com is paid for by a PAC, established by Brown, called the National Campaign Fund.
Asked about the expenditure, a McCain aide first noted that Citizens United is a 501c4 organization, not a 527 group. But the new McCain policy also restricts vendors that work with “independent groups,” such as Citizens United, which are tax-exempt and can engage in political activity.
Later, another campaign aide said that an internal firewall had been in place at Campaign Solutions since last year, thereby restricting communication coordination. This was the case, the aide said, “long before this [new] policy was in place. So they are fully compliant with our policy.” The campaign refused to offer documentation of the firewall.
It’s quite an operation McCain’s running over there, isn’t it?