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...this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law...

By streiff Posted in 2008 | John McCain | smears — Comments (33) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

There is a full-fledged assault underway on John McCain's reputation and it is more than a little uncertain that the McCain campaign has the ability to either recognize the assault or, if they do recognize it, respond to it in a timely and aggressive manner.

We're all familiar with the recent attack on John McCain's military record. We learn from Wesley Clark than all he did was ride airplanes and retired admiral egregious asshat Professor Mark Kleiman informs us that the Navy had found McCain's leadership wanting and declined to promote him to admiral, contra the statements of the Secretary of the Navy at the time.

Why the attack on McCain's years as a fighter pilot is anyone's guess. From the outside this certainly looks like a high-risk, low payoff strategy from Obama. There is another attack brewing that really matters. It is the attack on McCain's deserved reputation as a good government advocate.

Read on.

Probably the single act that made McCain's run for the presidency real was the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act. From my view there is little to like about the act but there is no denying that McCain 1) believed in the bill, 2) burned a lot of bridges to force this bill through Congress, and 3) won a boatload of good will from the press in bargain.

One of the first shots appeared in, naturally, The Nation, a magazine which still denies the guilt of Alger Hiss, the veracity of the Venona files, and most of the other evidence that the American Left was a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR (the significance of this will be readily apparent in a short while). The focal point for their attack is McCain's relationship to ::drum roll:: The Reform Institute and his connections to... lobbyists.

The rather dense, in every sense of the word, article is an inartful rehash of research by the NY Post's Ryan Sager, Ed Morrissey, and our own Brad Smith.

In their purest form the allegations flow from the obvious to the refuted to the existential.

The obvious claims are that 1) McCain was instrumental in founding the Reform Institute (True), 2) a lot of former McCain staffers and associates work at the Reform Institute (Yes), 3) a lot of those staffers also have worked as lobbyists (Guilty), 4) the Reform Institute solicits contributions (Whoddathunkit), and 5) the Reform Institute likes McCain (You bet).

The Nation tries to insinuate that by putting money into the Reform Institute worked much like the turnstile at the Clinton White House. That but giving a gift to the Reform Institute one was able to gain a favorable outcome before the committees chaired by John McCain.

As the two-time chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain enjoyed unprecedented access to the telecommunications industry. And Davis the lobbyist was the perfect conduit: between 2002 and 2005, for example, Verizon paid Davis Manafort $640,000 in lobbying fees. The contract began after McCain took over the committee and ended when he gave up chairmanship. At the same time Davis aggressively sought telecom donations for the Reform Institute. On two occasions he solicited $100,000 from Cablevision after CEO James Dolan testified before McCain's committee and McCain wrote letters to the Federal Communications Commission on Cablevision's behalf. The donations invited scrutiny from the press: McCain Allies Want Reform (And Money), the New York Times said in March 2005. That July McCain formally resigned from the board, citing "negative publicity," and Davis stepped down as president.

Yet unscrupulous donations from industries McCain was supposed to be monitoring were only part of the reason the Reform Institute became controversial. Even before the dubious fundraising came to light (the institute also twice failed to disclose the names of major donors on its tax returns, a potential violation of IRS law), McCain and Davis's my-way-or-the-highway approach to campaign-finance-reform legislation rubbed many in the reform community the wrong way.

This particular allegation has been examined to death since it was first floated by the AP in 2005. The story was a smear then as it is now. Even the AP had to acknowledge:

Help from McCain, who argues for ridding politics of big money, included giving the CEO of Cablevision Systems Corp. the opportunity to testify before his Senate committee, writing a letter of support to the Federal Communication Commission and asking other cable companies to support so-called a la carte pricing.

McCain had expressed interest in exploring the a la carte option for years before Cablevision advocated it but did not take a formal position with regulators until after the company's first donation came in. Cablevision is the eighth largest cable provider, serving about 3 million customers in the New York area.

Perhaps the most detailed examination of this nothingburger is here. Getting a contribution from someone who agrees with you on a postion and for voting for that position, which you had supported for years previously, doesn't strike most of us as corruption. And a quick look at the Reform Institute website will show they've never addressed this issue. Did McCain's committee chairmanship make Cablevision more likely to give to his pet think tank? Who knows. Even were this the case it would hardly be a head turner much less a scathing indictment.

But if you go back to Ed Morrissey's blog you'll find that the Reform Institute received contributions from groups in favor of abortion as well as from charities affiliated with Teresa Heinz Kerry and George Soros. There is no evidence that McCain voted in their favor after receiving contributions. From all indications it seems like the Reform Institute was the recipient of funds from a wide variety of sources, some of which were McCain allies and some of which were not. Hardly a scandal.

The last allegation may or may not be true and if it is it, in my view, rates a big so what. That claim is that the Reform Institute also served as a mechanism to keep McCain's campaign staff in paying jobs. That it served as a "campaign in exile." Even if true this strikes me as bordering on the silly. If there were a law against this it is difficult to see how a lot of think tanks would survive. The fact is that The Nation doesn't allege it is a violation of the law, or of ethics for that matter, but simply words it in a way that leaves the reader with that impression.

In reading this dog's breakfast I was reminded of the apocrypyhal story from George Smathers's victory over Claude Pepper in the 1950 Senate race in Florida:

Smathers was capable of going to any length in campaigning, but he indignantly denied that he had gone as far as a story printed in northern newspapers. The story wouldn't die, nonetheless, and it deserved not to. According to the yarn, Smathers had a little speech for cracker voters, who were presumed not to know what the words meant except that they must be something bad. The speech went like this: "Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy."

This sums up the story. McCain's sister is a thespian and he's a shameless extrovert. This story also points to why The Nation's shameless and mendacious record in dealing with the Heironymous Bosch landscape that was the Worker's Paradise is important here. Or rather why it isn't. If guilt by association were a valid concept then Katrina vanden Heuvel and her bad case of **** hair would be in Florence, Colorado. The fact is that people who are active on campaigns have to earn a living in the off years and in DC they usually end up in lobbying firms. If you're offended by the notion then perhaps a Trappist monastery would be a good place to go.

We'll be seeing more of this and similar stories in the future. The Obama camp is well aware of the incredible lightness of their candidate and they know that eventually he will have to answer some hard questions not only on his two-and-a-half-gainer quality of his flip flops but on his relationship to know terrorists and convicted felons. They have to rough up McCain in a major way before this happens. On the experience front they want to denigrate McCain's decades in the public square by loudly and falsely claiming that his foreign policy expertise is based on his years in a PW camp. On the issue of corruption they want to say tu quoque and move on.