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.

Michael Roston of Raw Story nails McCain in yet another falsehood connected to his clearly flailing defense of his relationship to and employ of lobbyists. Earlier today the Washington Post reported McCain as saying:

“I have many friends who represent various interests, ranging from the firemen to the police to senior citizens to various interests, particularly before my committee,” McCain said.

Roston looked at the lobbyists on McCain’s campaign and senate staffs and found that just isn’t true.

Unfortunately for McCain, a review of federal records maintained by the Senate Office of Public Records show that the lobbyists at the top of the senator’s campaign and senatorial staffs do not represent fire fighters, civil servants, or retirees, the legitimate causes he identified in his address on Friday.

According to the SOPR database, the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) does its own lobbying, and has also employed Dutko Worldwide, McAllister and Quinn, and Valis and Keelen, LLC.

The American Association of Retired People (AARP) also does much of its own lobbying, and has at times retained Bracewell & Giuliani, CJ Strategies, Davis, Wright Tremaine, LLP, Duberstein Group, Ernst & Young, Fleishman-Hillard Goverment Relations, Innovative Federal Strategies, Mark J. Iwry, Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland, and Stewart, and Reinecke Strategic Solutions.

Finally, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) does much of its own lobby work, too, and has also paid Jefferson Government Relations and Lussier, Gregor, Vienna and Associates. At the federal level, the American Federation of Government Employees is a member of the AFL-CIO, and has been represented by mCapitol Management, and Murphy, Frazer, and Selfridge.

A report in Friday’s Washington Post noted some of the lobbying firms that McCain’s lieutenants are members of: Rick Davis of Davis Manafort; Charles Black at BKSH and Associates; Steve Schmidt of Mercury Public Affairs; Marc McKinnon of Public Strategic, Inc.; Mark Buse of ML Strategies; and, Tom Loeffler of the Loeffler Group.

None of these firms are in the employ of the main representatives of the causes McCain identified as having a legitimate need to lobby government: fire fighters, civil servants, and retirees.

TeddySanFran at FireDogLake has more on the companies McCain’s lobbyists qua staff are working for.

McCain never should have been given a pass for representing himself as an anti-lobbyist candidate when he employs fifty-nine lobbyists and has them working out of his campaign bus. He was allowed to skate by without having these relationships scrutinized in a serious way for over a year. The revelations about his improper relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman has created an opportunity for questions to be asked that should have been asked long ago. From the roles lobbyists are playing on his staff, to who their clients are, to what sort of resources the McCain campaign affords their lobbyists to work with, questions are now being asked and the answers do not reflect well on John McCain.

One of the biggest challenges with the McCain lobbyist sex and corruption story with the Beltway press is that they will have a tendency to think it’s just about the sex. This is particularly odd because McCain has branded himself as an anti-lobbyist, anti-corruption politician. The existence of corruption in McCain’s life should be the automatic focus of journalists covering this scandal. But, of course, it’s not. Michael Scherer of Time’s Swampland completely misses the point in an effort to close the news cycle on the McCain-Iseman scandal:

With the world still sorting through the implications of the lady lobbyist sorta-scandal, John McCain got back on the trail today as if nothing had happened–a 30-minute town hall in Indianapolis, followed by about 30-minutes of questions from the audience, and nary a mention of the New York Times story. (Before he was introduced, someone on the stage did make a joke about canceling his Times subscription.)

After no one in the audience brought up the issue, the national press tried to keep it alive, by asking him about his campaign’s assaults on the Times. McCain did not bite. “I do not have any more comment about this issue,” McCain said, noting that he had answered questions about the Times story Thursday morning. “I do not intend to address the issue further.”

And it seemed to work. As is his traditional style, he stood for quite a while answering questions from the press on other issues, from the economy, his outreach to the black and youth vote, the recent FEC opinion on his ability to decline public financing, and the number of lobbyists working on his campaign. “These people have honorable records,” he said of his staff. [Emphasis added]

Um, Michael – that last line there is part of this scandal. This is about the influence lobbyists have on his campaign and the relationship lobbyists have to his policy decisions. Saying that McCain moved on and did not answer questions about the lobbyist-sex scandal is just not true.

McCain can duck questions about the sex side of the scandal. He’s clearly proving adept at it, while the press doesn’t seem too interested in stopping him from dodging their questions. But the discussion of lobbyists on his campaign and in his life is part of the same story as the sex. For evidence of this, note the strong efforts by liberal bloggers yesterday to shift the focus off of the sex and onto the corruption. Other than McCain’s propensity to lie about sex (hardly a big sin), this is a story that reflects poorly on McCain because of the influence he has allowed lobbyists to have on him.

The problem with making blanket denials and challenging the journalistic rigor of the people questioning your record is that what you have said and done does not cease to exist after you have denied certain types of behavior. Newsweek busts McCain in a lie about his connections to one of Vicki Iseman’s clients, Paxson Communications:

A sworn deposition that Sen. John McCain gave in a lawsuit more than five years ago appears to contradict one part of a sweeping denial that his campaign issued this week to rebut a New York Times story about his ties to a Washington lobbyist.

On Wednesday night the Times published a story suggesting that McCain might have done legislative favors for the clients of the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, who worked for the firm of Alcalde & Fay. One example it cited were two letters McCain wrote in late 1999 demanding that the Federal Communications Commission act on a long-stalled bid by one of Iseman’s clients, Florida-based Paxson Communications, to purchase a Pittsburgh television station.

Just hours after the Times’s story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff—and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. “No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC,” the campaign said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue,” McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. “He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint.”

While McCain said “I don’t recall” if he ever directly spoke to the firm’s lobbyist about the issue—an apparent reference to Iseman, though she is not named—”I’m sure I spoke to [Paxson].” McCain agreed that his letters on behalf of Paxson, a campaign contributor, could “possibly be an appearance of corruption”—even though McCain denied doing anything improper.

McCain’s subsequent letters to the FCC—coming around the same time that Paxson’s firm was flying the senator to campaign events aboard its corporate jet and contributing $20,000 to his campaign—first surfaced as an issue during his unsuccessful 2000 presidential bid. William Kennard, the FCC chair at the time, described the sharply worded letters from McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, as “highly unusual.” [Emphasis added]

The Newsweek article highlights a number of points where it appears McCain had more information about his dealings with Paxson than his staff did. McCain’s campaign told Newsweek, “We do not have the transcript you excerpted,” which would be a key reason they were putting out bad information yesterday. That said, it certainly reflects poorly on McCain and his campaign staff that they can’t get their facts straight on a story they’ve been trying to kill for three months.

I have an amalgamation of my two posts at the Huffington Post on the apparent non-denial denial by McCain of an intervention by any advisers in the matter of his relationship with Vicki Iseman. I start:

There’s been a lot of hay made on right wing blogs, talk radio, and ol’ fashioned cable news today that the New York Times ran an unsourced smear job against John McCain. The goal of this kind of pushback is to discredit the Times reporting on a possible sex scandal, thereby discounting the entire story of corruption, reminiscent to the destruction of Dan Rather’s reporting on George W. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard. But we cannot allow there to be any adjudication of the accuracy of what the Times’ anonymous “two former associates” said based on the fact that the reports are anonymous, when John McCain has only issued a non-denial denial of the intervention connected to these “two former associates.”

To understand why the relationship between McCain and Iseman should remain an issue – though not the sole issue – under discussion, we need to look at what the Times and the Washington Post have separately reported about the intervention with McCain and what McCain has said in response.

From there, I go through the Times, Post, and McCain’s accounts of what has been said and done. In the end, I continue to see this as an area that the press should seek clarification on from McCain. Parsing and using word-dodges won’t cut it.

Read my full Huffington Post piece here.

Earlier I had posted on the contradictions present between John McCain’s statements about whether his staff intervened regarding his relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. I then updated the post in recognition that the Times piece, per Marc Ambinder, speaks of “associates” intervening with McCain himself, not staff or aides. The Washington Post, in an update to their previously posted piece, is reporting the following:

Members of the senator’s small circle of advisers also confronted McCain directly, according to sources, warning him that his continued ties to a lobbyist who had business before the powerful commerce committee he chaired threatened to derail his presidential ambitions.

Appearing before reporters this morning in Toledo, Ohio, McCain flatly denied receiving such warnings from his aides and said he had no knowledge that Weaver or anyone else on his staff had told Iseman to keep her distance.

The first line seems to connect advisers and associates in the same vein as the Times had previously reported the intervention. Neither are saying the people offering this information are staffers or aides. It is clear that at least two people very high up in the McCain universe have confirmed to both the Times and Post that they had a direct intervention with McCain over Iseman.

McCain’s denial, however, is circumscribed to aides and staff. In that sense, when it comes to the intervention by associates or advisers in his relationship with Vicki Iseman, John McCain is issuing a non-denial denial.

I think the press has an obligation to start highlight the intense (dare I say, Bill Clinton-esque?) parsing being committed by John McCain.

The McCain campaign just sent an email to their list trying to fundraise off the New York Times’ reporting of McCain’s inappropriate relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. It included this passage:

Objective observers are viewing this article exactly as they should – as a sleazy smear attack from a liberal newspaper against the conservative Republican frontrunner. Sean Hannity said, after reading the article three times, “It was so full of innuendo and so lacking of fact, and so involved in smear, I came to the conclusion that the goal here was to bring up a 20-year-old scandal.” Washington attorney Bob Bennett, who was the Democrat counsel during the Keating investigation, said, “This is a real hit job.” Joe Scarborough called the allegations “outrageous.” Even pundit Alan Colmes — not known for his conservative leanings — concludes “this is a non-story.” [Emphasis added]

Bob Bennett is neither objective nor an observer. He is the criminal lawyer McCain retained to beat back the Times story last December. He met with Times reporters Stephen Labaton, Jim Rutenberg, and Marilyn Thompson in an effort to dissuade them from publishing this story and to answer questions about McCain’s relationship with Iseman. Last night, Bennett was the primary McCain surrogate on news networks attacking the Times’ reporting and defending McCain.

I do not know of a single definition of the words “objective” or “observer” that fits Bob Bennett’s role in this case. He is a paid partisan who has proactively been a part of this story since December. The McCain campaign’s description of Bennett is laughable.

…The McCain email also falsely describes MoveOn.org as a “soft money PAC.” They’re actually a hard money PAC and they disclose the source of every donation over $200. You’d think McCain campaign would know the difference between soft and hard money, as his campaign finance legislation had something to do with how these entities handle disclosure.

Jane Hamsher’s right:

It’s about his relationship with a telecom lobbyist who boasted about her ability to professionally influence him in business situations, and whose lobbying interests McCain has taken clear action to help.

Or, to put it differently: It’s not about the sex, it’s about the corruption.

…Though I do think that if there is documented evidence or first-hand, on the record accounts of how this inappropriate relationship with a woman who is not his wife, it would be valuable in removing the false patina around John McCain as an honorable man of upstanding principle. He’s not and beating back that narrative is important. A bona fide sex scandal wouldn’t be valuable for the sex, but for the impact a scandal of that nature would have on his image.

Update:

Or, as clammyc puts it, “It’s the credibility, stupid”