One of the key aspects of McCain’s use of the public campaign finance regime to help his campaign is using it as leverage to get on the ballot in certain states. Ballot access is often a hard proposition, requiring a great deal of time, infrastructure and money to succeed. I’m trying to get a full list of states that McCain used his qualification for matching funds as a means of getting on the ballot, but here is the story in Ohio. This is the former Republican commissioner to the FEC:

McCain used his FEC certification for at least one other purpose.Qualifying for the presidential primary ballot in Ohio is a complex process, requiring a candidate to gather over 100 signatures in each of the state’s 18 districts, using separate petitions for each county within the district, which must be filed with local election boards around the state. Additionally, the candidate must gather still more signatures statewide, all under some very complicated rules and local interpretations. Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and most of the presidential campaigns went through this process, at considerable time and expense. With a filing date of January 3, this was done by these campaigns at precisely the moment McCain was desperately borrowing to keep his campaign afloat, lacking money and resources to organize and gather signatures to be placed on the Ohio ballot.

But Ohio has an alternative means of getting on the ballot – you can simply present your FEC matching funds authorization to the Secretary of State, and go straight to the ballot, without petitioning.And this is what Senator McCain did.

Jonathan Singer of MyDD reports:

First, McCain was able to get around ballot access rules for the primaries in states around the country — at a value of $2-$3 million (what Dean’s own campaign had to spend on ballot access, having not participated in the public financing system in 2004) — by participating in the program. Pulling out now would enable him to reap the material benefit of ballot access offered by the program — again, valued at millions of dollars — without having to abide by the program’s overall spending limit (somewhere in the neighborhood of $54 million).

Second, McCain used the promise of public funds as collateral to help secure a private loan. Once a candidate uses actual public funds in this manner, they have used those dollars, thus locking them into the program. This is key, not only in that it seems to bind him to the program but also in that McCain showed a clear willingness to capitalize on voluntary taxpayer money in order to help him raise more funds from special interest lobbyists (some of whom are at the upper echelons of his campaign staff).

Finally, now that McCain is in the program and hasn’t been certified to pull out — an act that requires a vote of the FEC — it seems that he may have already gone over the spending limit in violation of the law. As of the last campaign finance filing deadline, McCain was already coming dangerously close to the $54 million threshold, and in the weeks since he might have already passed it.

In short, this is an issue of integrity — and John McCain’s lack of it. What the DNC is asking the FEC to do is fairly simple: Require McCain’s campaign to abide by the legally binding contract it created with the federal government to enjoy the benefits of the public financing system — benefits his campaign has already used — in return for abiding by the program’s spending limits. Soon the ball will be in the FEC’s court. Let’s see where they go from here.

I’d like to see how this complaint is adjudicated in the absence of a quorum on the FEC. Right now there are four slots open on the Commission and they cannot form to act on any issue. It will be interesting to see how Dean seeks to change that – will he push for the Senate to quickly confirm the pending nominees, including the arch-conservative vote suppressor Hans von Spakovsky? Or will Democrats seek a new batch of nominees before they confirm them?

Separate from the desire to get McCain to, you know, not break the law, the political value of the DNC’s complaint would be to get the FEC to agree with them and force McCain to freeze spending between now and when he officially receives the GOP nomination. That would provide a massive structural advantage to the Democratic nominee and force McCain to be a punching bag in the ad war between now and late August.

The key in my mind is how can the FEC act on this complaint now? What can Democrats do to ensure that action is taken on this complaint? A negative news cycle on McCain from this complaint is not going to damage his chances of winning in November, whereas an FEC decision tying him to public financing for the duration of the primary season could help ensure Democratic victory.

In today’s Times, Stephen Labaton has a follow-up to the McCain lobbyist sex/corruption story by delving further into the letters McCain sent on behalf of Paxson Communications, a client of lobbyist Vicki Iseman.

The Washington Post reported Friday on its Web site that Mr. Paxson acknowledged in an interview that he had met with Mr. McCain to discuss the letters before they were sent and that Ms. Iseman was probably at the meeting.

In three interviews with The Times since December, Mr. Paxson has provided varying accounts about the letters. In the first, he said Ms. Iseman was involved in the drafting of them and had lobbied Mr. McCain. He later said he could not recall who had been involved.

Paxson told the Times different things, but there’s a big difference between not remembering who was involved and recounting a scenario where Iseman lobbied McCain and wrote the letters he sent to the FCC. That is, it’s easy for someone to say they don’t remember what happened, but when that comes after telling the Times that Iseman had authored the letters McCain sent to the FCC, it doesn’t really pass the smell test.

What’s particularly telling about this aspect of Iseman’s relationship with McCain is that it is the archetypal example of how lobbyists corrupt the process of governance. Paxson, a McCain campaign donor, hired a lobbyist to lobby McCain on issues concerning his business interests that were germane to a committee McCain chaired. That lobbyist had a close relationship with McCain and ended up authoring a letter McCain sent on behalf of Paxson and another telecommunications company to the agency that regulates Paxson’s business. That McCain put his name on the bottom of a letter written by a lobbyist on behalf of her employer tells you everything you need to know about McCain’s ethical compass.

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.

I think Steve Benen really does a good job of distilling the failure of John McCain and his campaign to respond to the lobbyist sex and corruption story in a coherent manner.

But taking a step back, consider the broader McCain pushback against the NYT story. By Wednesday night, the McCain gang was absolutely in rapid response mode, knocking down the article with considerable ferocity. By Thursday morning, the senator, well prepped, gave a series of sweeping denials at a major press conference.

Far too many of the McCain claims, however, haven’t withstood even minor scrutiny. McCain hadn’t spoken to anyone at Paxson, except he had. His letters on Paxson’s behalf were considered perfectly acceptable to the FCC, except that they weren’t. The McCain campaign made no effort to squash the NYT article, except that they went to great lengths to do just that. McCain never even spoke the NYT about the piece, except that he had.

Josh Marshall added, “There’s no way of getting around the fact that McCain routinely, almost constantly, issues categorical denials that are demonstrably false. The very volume and clarity of the bogusness of so many of these statements might even be viewed as his best defense.”

And why would a presumptive presidential nominee make obviously false, easy-to-disprove claims? Because McCain doesn’t really care — he knows reporters have given him an unearned reputation as a “straight talker,” and he assumes he can more or less lie with impunity.

Clearly this is a cookie that I’ve been nibbling at for the last two days, but Benen and Marshall get the argument nice and tight.

Paul Waldman’s interview with Newsweek’s Matthew Phillips delves into the how and why of the media’s infatuation with John McCain.