This was definitely the right move, considering the story’s potential for uncomfortable questions.
Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign will return all of the contributions solicited by the Jordanian business partner of one of Mr. McCain’s most prolific fund-raisers.
The decision caps a frenetic two days in which both the Washington Post and The New York Times published articles scrutinizing a cluster of more than $50,000 in unusual contributions from a single extended family, the Abdullahs, in California and several of their friends.
Several of the contributors, who seemed to be unusual major donors to a political campaign, expressed in interviews indifference or even hostility to Mr. McCain’s candidacy.
The donations were credited to Harry Sargeant III, who is the finance chairman for the Florida Republican Party and part-owner of a major oil trading firm. But the contributions were actually solicited by Mustafa Abu Naba’a, a longtime business partner of Mr. Sargeant’s.
McCain campaign spokesperson Brian Rogers told reporters, “We are taking the precautionary effort of returning any and all contributions that were solicited by Mr. Abu Naba’a. We had an issue with the idea there were people giving to the campaign who had no intention of voting for or supporting John McCain.”
Rogers added that the McCain campaign believes it can accept bundled donations collected by a foreign national like Abu Naba’a, but in this case, the contributions “just didn’t sound right” to the campaign.
Marc Ambinder comes through with the Question of the Day: “If there were a group of questionable donations all with the name Abdullah that were funneled through a guy in Jordan who is a Jordanian national who is under investigation for war profiteering, and it were Barack Obama instead of John McCain, would this be a bigger deal?”
Of course, it would. And to borrow an Atrios line, “This has been another edition of easy answers to easy questions.”
I was thinking of all the reasons for the double standard here, but before I could write it up, Greg Sargent beat me to it.
It’s unfortunate, but judgments by editors and campaign journalists about the newsworthiness of such stuff, and opinions from pundits as to how controversial they should be, are largely driven by preconceived notions — sometimes arbitrary ones — about the candidates’ vulnerabilities.
Obama, for obvious (and some not so obvious) reasons, has been judged to be vulnerable to the charge that he’s a terrorist sympathizer. John McCain is not seen as vulnerable to this charge. Thus, if Obama had received a bunch of shadowy contributions from a guy named Abdullah, it would have made it easier for the GOP to exacerbate a vulnerability that has already been presumed to exist. This alone would make folks treat it like a bigger story. […]
The irony, of course, is that this is a self-perpetuating dynamic. Because a candidate has been deemed in advance to be vulnerable to a particular accusation, stories that play to that accusation get more attention, which in turn makes that candidate still more vulnerable to it. These things should not be driving decisions about what is and isn’t news. But this is how it works. Sorry.
It’s frustrating beyond words, but that sums it up quite nicely.