The Associated Press has an analysis piece up about John McCain’s battles with the FEC over how he has leveraged federal matching funds to secure private loans is now threatening to remove the aura McCain generally is considered to have when of being a respected and honorable politician when it comes to ethics and campaign finance.

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.

…

The leverage McCain had to keep Obama in the public finance system might now be slipping as he challenges the FEC.

“More than anyone else, Senator McCain’s name is synonymous with campaign finance reform,” Rick Hasen, a campaign finance expert and law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, wrote in his Web log. “If he’s arguably in violation of the law, that will tarnish his reputation. He may be able to make technically correct arguments that he is not in violation, but the smell is bad.” [Emphasis added]

Now, Hasen’s statement is only remarkable in that it is being said about John McCain. But what’s key here is that the press is adopting the narrative around McCain’s campaign finance foibles that the blogs and the Democratic Party have pushed.

The biggest challenge the Democrats will have with John McCain as the Republican nominee is that he is thought of as only a step or two below sainthood. His campaign’s actions around the matching funds strike directly against his image.  The more we can get the press to recognize the dissonance between McCain’s persona and his actions, the more likely it will be to create a positive environment for Democratic electoral success.